this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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Some parts of the world (mostly Europe, I think) use dots instead of commas for displaying thousands. For example, 5.000 is 5,000 and 1.300 is 1,300
Yeah, and they're wrong.
It makes sense from typographical standpoint, the comma is the larger symbol and thus harder to overlook, especially in small fonts or messy handwriting
But from a grammatical sense it’s the opposite. In a sentence, a comma is a short pause, while a period is a hard stop. That means it makes far more sense for the comma to be the thousands separator and the period to be the stop between integer and fraction.
I have no strong preference either way. I think both are valid and sensible systems, and it's only confusing because of competing standards. I think over long enough time, due to the internet, the period as the decimal separator will prevail, but it's gonna happen normally, it's not something we can force. Many young people I know already use it that way here in Germany