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Comment by thanatropism | Hacker News Reader

Don't you find exponent notation to be neater?

1E+03 = one thousand 1E+06 = one million 1E+09 = a thousand millions / an american billion 1E+12 = an american trillion / an european billion

.. and that's as far as you need; the GDP of most countries is on the order of 1E+12 or 1E+13

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I think I have genuinely never seen scientific notation used in an accouting context. If it can be rounded, then we will use 1MM or 1B.

I see it as follows. Unlike science, where there are a few numbers related in complex ways, accounting has very many numbers, related in very simple ways.

I assume he requires a few more significant figures in his line of work

It's not like scientific notation precludes that. 1.234567E+06 = 1234567, but it's also at a glance obviously around 1 million

wait wait wait, a billion means two different things in Europe and America? I'm from Europe and I always used 1 billion to say 10^9. I hardly see how I would not have noticed figures being so different in say, news articles from America and Britain.

When I was growing up in Ireland, a billion was a million million in Britain and Ireland. Now, we have adopted the American thousand million. In Germany and Italy, a thousand million is a Milliard, and a billion is a trillion.

Slovak and Czech have it same as Germany/Italy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales

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