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by petecooper 1042 days ago
>$100.000 each day

For clarity & comment skimmers:

TFA uses $100,000 in the subheading and beyond. Some European countries use `.` as a thousands separator, so it's not "a hundred dollars a day".

3 comments

I have experienced this pain, and wrote an article about it: https://kodare.net/2021/04/04/safe_number_parsing.html
Norway being one of those.
Nobody should use punctuation as thousands separator regardless of which side you are on.
Commas are punctuation too... so what are you proposing?
At a guess

100000

My personal preference would be: 100000 (monetary symbol), but, I also understand that others might prefer the symbol before the numeric (i.e. $100000), even though you would not say "Dollars one hundred thousand" in English.

The closest you get to an international standard (that not many use) is the International Bureau of Weights and Measures recommending (ideally thin) spaces (so "10 000")
Could use a space or an underscore:

100 000

100_000

Interesting! Do you know of any countries that use the underscore? I believe I've seen France(...?) use spaces as a separator, but I've never come across the underscore.

Personally I would like some means of breaking up units of triplets that could be used universally. It's frustrating that there isn't a standard across the globe for such crucial means of expression. It wasn't until fairly recently that I learned that the comma wasn't the universal standard.

I am not aware of any country using the underscore to separate multiple of thousands, I just thought of it because it can be used for that purpose in some programming languages. Ans if it's true that no country is using it, then I guess it could be used as a 'neutral' way of doing it.
Spaces cause ambiguity with separate values like 123 456. Underscores are ambiguous with missing values due to the common use of a line segment to indicate where to fill out form values in addition to the same separate values issue as spaces.
How about U+202F NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE?

1 000 (Narrow nbsp)

1 000 (Regular nbsp)

(Assuming HN even allows it.)

why not '
Now you have two problems.
I got 99.0 problems and separators ain't one
No one uses 3 digits to represent cents, so nobody is going to interpret this as a hundred dollars a day.
Bahraini Dinar (and some other Dinars I believe) use 3 digits for their currency. I wouldn't assume no dollar does it. Sure, it's very unlikely. But if you've never dealt with some other currency, it may not by that obvious.
Prior to the decimalization of the stock market, I'd see $42.0625 and similar prices. 0.0625 being 1/16th of a dollar.

Post 2001, the requirements are that that stocks traded for under $1.00 may have a minimum spread of $0.0001 and so you still can see it and have to work with it.

"Falsehoods programmers believe about time^Wmoney

(Reference to https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b...)

A decent list for this about prices and currency https://gist.github.com/rgs/6509585 and the full list of other falsehoods https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood
It took me a minute. My brain saw the period and then truncated the third zero to make sense of it. This is pretty common in humans. But because I thought that one hundred dollars was odd, I read the article, which I then realized it was one hundred thousand.
There are some exceptions:

BHD Bahraini Dinar

IQD Iraqui Dinar

JOD Jordanian Dinar

KWD Kuwaiti Dinar

LYD Libyan Dinar

OMR Omani Rial

TND Tunisian Dinar

Although GP is still technically correct, as a cent is by definition 1/100th of a unit of currency.

The above all use fils instead.

Mils, or mills. (Typo, or autocorrupt French keyboard?)
Oh. I didn't know that. Thanks!
Cent is short for 'centime' or 1/100th, so indeed, nobody is using three digits to represent cents. But there are currencies with finer grained denominations than cents.

0, 2, 3, 4 are all in use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_4217

Gasoline in the USA was (is?) priced to the third decimal place (always a 9).
That's fair. I stand corrected. Thank you.