Hacker News Reader

Comment by blackobelisk | Hacker News Reader

sometimes I actually format it "10$" and it weirds people out. makes sense to me though.

Don't mean to offend anyone, but there are more issues with units in the US ;)

[0] http://www.joeydevilla.com/2008/08/13/countries-that-dont-us...

Your list of backwaters is cute, if the US used only metric they would be even more dominating of the entire planet, which I doubt you would like.

It really makes no sense, every other unit follows the number but with money it goes before. The temperature outside is F10, that package weights lbs14, the football is at psi1.8.

In Europe, it is acceptable to put the € symbol after the digits as in 10,67€. Just putting in a contrast here..

This is how we write it in French (3.14€ instead of €3.14).

For Polish currency you also put the "zł" symbol after the price(50zł). Absolutely never ever before the price.

"Acceptable" is not really the right word here - in most (all?) EUR countries it is actually the norm.

Not in my experience.. The europeans i know usually write € 123,40. Granted in advertisements and billboards you'll often see the € sign suffixed in small, or just left out entirely, but i dont base my norm on advertisements.

When suffexed, i mostly see "EUR" or "EURO" used instead of the € symbol: 123,40 EUR.

> Not in my experience.. The europeans i know usually write € 123,40.

Your experience is a minority, and most likely sourced in a country which doesn't use the Euro as its currency (like the UK)

By and large, European locales (this is orthogonal to language) put the € sign at the same place they put their previous currency signs, and for most of them it's after: the Dutch, Austrians, Cypriots, Irish, Liechtensteiner, Latvian and Maletese use the prefix form, everybody else uses postfix (about 80% of EU population, slightly more than that wrt Euro-using countries as the UK amounts for 12.5% of the EU population but doesn't use the Euro)

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_issues_concerning_th... for a reasonably complete table.

That table claims it follows the value in Germany, that is not entirely correct.

Colloquially, EUR values are expressed with the currency symbol following the value, but in nearly all business correspondence (i.e. invoices, contracts, etc), it is actually prefixed and in many cases (likely for historical compatibility reasons) spelled out.

In other words, in day-to-day use you'd likely see this:

123,40 €

In more formal situations and invoices you'd expect this:

EUR 123,40

I'm not sure whether this split pre-dates the Euro. I recall seeing "DM 123,40" before the Euro, but I was too young to pay much attention to that kind of thing. Most signage used "123,40 DM" or even "12 Pf." (for Pfennig, the equivalent of cents) or left it off entirely, I think.

In the UK we place the € symbol before the digits when referring to European prices (probably because the £ symbol is also placed before the digits).

Sparrow missiles are pretty fast - they go at 2.5 Mach. I tried to take a photo, but it was too washed out as my stop was set at 32f. I was so angry with the camera, I dissolved it in my acid bath, which was 1.4pH.

That'll teach me, I guess, for taking photos near Area 51 :)

I'm not sure that mach and pH are units per say. pH for example is on a nonlinear scale and mach itself is unitless. Maybe that's totally irrelevant.

I guess its fruitless to try and apply logic to language and better to just accept the general usage?

You may have nailed it - apart from 'area 51', which is a proper name (and whose order I messed up to make the joke, unfortunately), the others are all ratios, not discrete units.

On the other hand, it's also worth noticing that scientific units come from science, but monetary units come from finance. The regularised SI system is only a couple of hundred years old, and ledger entries are much older. My guess is that merchants in ye olde Europe had to deal with a variety of currencies, and putting the currency first was convention. It may have also made it clearer in a manifest as to which column was cost and which was amount, in an era when weights and measures were highly varied. Absolutely no supporting data for this, just a hunch :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com