The long scale is far from just a novelty, most European countries other than the UK use it. Actually I thought it was used in all non-English-speaking countries, but Wikipedia showed me that the situation is far more complicated than I thought:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#/media/F...

Besides short scale and long scale, there is a sizable "short scale with milliard instead of billion" fraction, and of course some countries (China, India, Japan, Greece) have completely different systems. Most interesting is that Portugal uses the long scale, while Brazil uses the short scale. That must be confusing...