They're not even consistent.

1E+03 = one thousand 1E+06 = one million 1E+09 = a thousand millions / an american billion 1E+12 = an american trillion / an european billion

.. and that's as far as you need; the GDP of most countries is on the order of 1E+12 or 1E+13

I see it as follows. Unlike science, where there are a few numbers related in complex ways, accounting has very many numbers, related in very simple ways.

This , vs . is often a problem, because my bank will issue tables with , used as decimal separator, but copying that into some tool everything breaks because it expects . to be used.

it is amazing, all those CS and other courses and still every new generation of (predominantly) US developers discover the fact that there is a world outside the US.

the most dominant data point to prove that software creation is still far away form being called a form of engineering. it's hacking, children throwing shit together then calling it "working".

And using OS language settings won't help either. Im from Europe but would not want to require using "," for the decimal separator enforced by OS settings, or anything related to programming or communicating with people on the Internet would become difficult.

I'd much rather have just everyone use the same convention for this. The C-locale convention for example. But for dates, please don't use the non-sorted American order. For dates the Japanese have it right :)

That would be a easy programmatic way to solve the problem, that wouldn't require the whole world to adopt a single standard. But of course it'll never happen, as it would require that all programmers know their shit and follow good practices, when it's much easier to throw the technical debt onto users and let them cope with the problem.

So if I open a file in Notepad and type 400,123 (using the comma on my keyboard), what character encoding should that be done with?

Best statement I've read on HN for months now.

It took me a long time to find out the issue. I was saving files in CSV using standards methods from Visual Basic. By default, the decimal separator in French is a comma. When Visual Basic saved a number in the CSV file, it saved it with the comma and without escaping or quoting. When the file was read back, the decimal part of the number was thought to be another column...

The only reason, it worked on my computer is that I had set up the decimal separator to a dot there because I found it more readable.

It's actually pretty interestingly split, world-wide.