>What's strange to me is that you seem to know this but still want to say something about it.

Because on a world-wide message board it's still inherently ambiguous. My comment was meant to serve two purposes. First, to draw attention to the ambiguity for others who use `.` as a decimal separator and read "10.000" as "10" (as I very nearly did). Second, to seek clarification because there is a non-zero chance that the OP is in fact a precision-minded person who saw a small productivity improvement when switching to Kotlin.

>Its like an Englishman saying colour and you saying, "you mean color, right?" Just seems unnecessary.

More like when an Englishman says "biscuit". in many contexts I would ask for clarification because my definition of "biscuit" is different from the common British usage, but it's also possible that the Englishman knows this and really does mean "American biscuit".

As an American who moved to the UK, I second your defence.

Awareness that you might be misinterpreting something and seeking to get clarity is a virtuous habit, both in programming and in productive discourse.

As an Englishman who still doesn't quite understand what an American biscuit is or why on earth you would put gravy on it, I second your defence too. It was a perfectly polite clarification.

If you've not actually experienced them in person, it might help to think of them as small savory (not sweet) cakes, typically served hot. Generally salty and fairly high in fat. They serve much the same role as croissant, but from an area where much of the flour was "pastry" flour which lacks the structure and tensile strength for yeast - raised bread.

An American biscuit is actually a Scottish scone. (Note, not what most people in the US or England know as a scone but a specific item historically made in Scotland that is identical to the US biscuit).

Source: my grandfather made them.

As to gravy: yes. Odd.

FWIW, I read it as 10% and would not have had it fixed if not for your comment.

I also felt spending an hour for a 10% productivity boost was well worth it, so it didn't strike me as odd.

A 9.999% boost wouldn't be worth it though, so I appreciated the extra precision.

Sorry I didn't respond very timely, but after considering the comment chain, I think perhaps you are right. The irony, now, is my comment was the unnecessary one.

I think you're reading into it wrong. 0xffff2 isn't correcting the parent, rather trying to clarify that by saying 10.000, that would be equivalent to 10000, since in America we use commas instead of periods for thousands denotation. We can't automatically know where people live and what standards they use, so we ask to clarify.

It's not a matter of geography. It's a matter of language. In English, a period acts as the radix point and a comma acts as a separator. It's a common error for people who learned English as a second language to use the convention of their native language when writing in English.

No, it's a matter of geography (or should I say locale). Raised in South Africa, we English speakers were taught to write "ten thousand and forty one-hundredths" as

    10.000,40

which is exactly the opposite of the US based

    10,000.40

So it's locale rather than language that determines this.