Re:What it looks like when Google links to your website
by davidp on Thursday July 04, 2013 @11:00AM
(#5990915)
This takes me back to 20 years ago when I was studying Japanese. Their traditional (pre-Arabic-numerals) system uses four-digit groupings instead of three: There are characters for ten, hundred, thousand, and ten-thousand. (I assume Chinese is similar.)
Sometimes we use the number "1 million" to mean "a lot"; in that system it would be written as 100 ten-thousands. A more "natural" way to express "a lot" in that system is ten-thousand ten-thousands, or 100 million in our system.
I loved learning little "weird" things like that, and discovering that our own way of doing things isn't the only way. Studying other cultures also teaches us about our own.
Any better-qualified Japanese speakers please correct anything I've gotten wrong, this memory file was just swapped in from 20 years ago...
Re:What it looks like when Google links to your website
by marcosdumay on Thursday July 04, 2013 @04:39PM
(#5992343)
Or use the engineering notation: 217k users.
Re:What it looks like when Google links to your website
by bbrks on Thursday July 04, 2013 @04:51PM
(#5992375)
> 2.17e5
FTFY
Re:What it looks like when Google links to your website
by _delirium on Thursday July 04, 2013 @02:03PM
(#5991755)
India uses a system sort of like that as well, even in English. The first major multiple is thousands, like in the western system, but then it goes in multiples of 100 above that: a lakh is 100 thousands (written 1,00,000), and a crore is 100 lakh (10 million, written 1,00,00,000).
The standard where I'm from is also a period for thousands, and a comma for the decimal fraction, but reading as much English scientific and computing literature, I am well aware that the period for decimal fraction is almost a de facto standard. So I tend to use spaces for the thousands and a period for the decimal fraction, so that anyone who sees the spaces can infer what the other symbol means.
Fortunately I am not aware of any notation system that uses a space to separate the decimal fraction :)