[Towaway69]

> 55 us liquid gallons = 208,198 litres

I was also confused but could be German usage where comma and dots are swapped. The German 208,198 is the same as the English 208.198

Conversely the English 1,000,000 is 1.000.000 in German! Very confusing.

Remember Germany is still the place where you say four-and-twenty for twenty-four …

[lucumo]

> Conversely the English 1,000,000 is 1.000.000 in German! Very confusing.

Well, yes. But it's mostly the Anglosphere being weird again: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DecimalSeparator.s...

I personally like to use thin spaces or apostrophes as a thousands separator, precisely to avoid the language confusion. I also try to avoid three decimals going for 2 or 4 instead, but you can't always do that, because it changes the content.

> Remember Germany is still the place where you say four-and-twenty for twenty-four …

As someone from another language that does that: agreed. It gets even weirder with 124: one hundred four and twenty. Middle-endianness is silly.

[resist_futility]

It's pretty even on both sides of dot and comma

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Conventions_...

[Towaway69]

Thanks for that, I didn’t know it was that common. Would be interesting to know whether there was ever an attempt to find a globally consistent form.

If you look at the image, Antarctica has “data unavailable” - seems we still don’t know what the penguins use! /s

[card_zero]

For the thousands separator, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (based in France) recommends the use of a space, and as a result this is used in France.

[Xixi]

Commas and dots being swapped is fairly common on continental Europe: I think it's the case at least in Germany, France, Spain and Italy. Probably other countries as well.

Since we're talking about numbers, in France we used to count by blocks of 20, and the usage somewhat persists to this day: so, for instance, 72 is read "sixty twelve" (60+12), 81 is read "four twenty one" (4x20+1), and 96 is read "four twenty sixteen" (4x20+16). Mind bending for the poor French learners...

[elric]

> Remember Germany is still the place where you say four-and-twenty for twenty-four …

That's a weird remark to make. Lots of languages do that. And if you want to talk weird numbers, try Japanese with their 10k grouping (e.g. 100k is 10 10k, juu man, 1M is 100 100k, hyaku man, etc).

[Towaway69]

Humans are truly creative when it comes to counting.

Regularly switching between four-and-twenty and twenty-four, I find it annoying and hence a slight frustration might have sipped through.

[dkga]

Laughs in Danish!

[sllabres]

this usage of the decimal separator is not a German thing only [1] and globally not very consistent.

One third of the world seems to use ".", the other third "," and the others decides with own rules or have own symbols. (Space, "'" and "·" and "_" in many variants).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Conventions_...

[card_zero]

I like the idiosyncratic Indian digit grouping where you start with a group of three and group the rest of the number in pairs, it's very creative.

[jcgrillo]

Yeah I deleted that when I realized my misinterpretation. I was thrown by two different styles of notation in the same post.

[froh]

apologies for the cut n pasted confusion :-D