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by dingo_bat 3125 days ago
I'm sorry if I came across as hostile or rude. I genuinely feel that using decimals as digit separators is distracting and technically wrong when you're writing English.

Full disclosure since some people are assuming I'm an American imperialist: I am not an American, nor have I ever been to America.

2 comments

First, I don't care where you're from and I generally dislike engaging with people who will say things like "American imperialist", particularly when it relates to communications standards.

Second, it's okay to have opinions, but in this case, groups with significantly more clout (ie - the Conference on Weights and Measures) disagree. In the early 2000s, the conference resolved that the symbol for the decimal marker could be either a period or a comma. Both are completely acceptable. The Conference on Weights and Measures also does not approve of the use of thousands separators, so technically, these are both correct:

1 000 000.25 1 000 000,25

But this is always wrong:

1,000,000.25

So the comment he was complaining about was wrong too!

I am happy python let's us use _ now to separate thousands positions.

>if I came across as hostile or rude

How did you think you would come across, if you call someone "insane" and the behaviour of others "fucking stupid"?