Hacker News Reader

Comment by vondur | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to see the .216 charging station.

Not sure if this is a joke or serious. For those unfamiliar, period (.) is used as the thousands separator in European countries, whereas much of the world uses the comma (,). The case for the decimal separator is switched. So 69.76 would be written as 69,76 in Europe.

It depends where in Europe ;) Switzerland, Liechtenstein and United Kingdom use decimal point.

In Romania the comma should be the decimal separator in theory.

In practice my online banking uses the dot, and doesn't accept commas anywhere. And it's a Romanian bank with a homemade web interface.

I just checked 3 random paper receipts i had lying around (from different stores), two use the comma and one the dot.

The French, on the other hand, religiously use the comma as a decimal separator.

In Switzerland we mostly use the format 12'345'678.901

Obviously I'm biased but I think it's the best system because there's no room for confusion.

But you do use a decimal point. Liechtenstein uses exactly the same format.

Interesting! Does it differ in different languages? I assumed German Swiss will use the same system as Germany, French Swiss the same in French, etc.

It's not much of the world, it about "the former British empire", and the world is more or less split in half (check the wikipedia link that one of the sibling comments posted)

I think that the best approach is to avoid to use comma or period as a thousand separator and just consider both of them as a decimal separator. It seems that the recommended approach for digit grouping is just a thin space [1], but since that character is not something that you can find on a regular keyboard and the regular space can be too wide, I think that one of the alternatives (like the apostrophe) is fine too. 169.216 or 169.216 can both be ambiguous , 169 216 and 169'216 or 169_216 much less

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Digit_groupi...

Not sure you're joking (Europe vs. US decimal point usage etc.), which would be fine of course, in the case you didn't it's 169216 charging stations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator

(on the map of that article you can basically see the British Empire)

The joke in this case being "reading an English comment" rather than Europe vs. US: the decimal point is part of all flavours of written English, not just the US.

Yes, see the link, but as I assume most of the English speaking readers here are from the US (I might be wrong of course), I wrote US.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com