In Hindi (India - applies to probably other Indian languages too), it is
every 2 digits AFTER thousand:
E.g., 10,00,000 (Hindi) rather than 1,000,000.
This is because of way numbers are spelled in language. There is a
unique word for thousand. Then new words occur for numbers every
multiple of 100 - lakh, crore, arab, kharab, ... Unlike English where
you get them in multiples of 1000 - million, billion, ...
There must be similar linguistic reasons in China/Korea/Japan - as yr
ref points out.
Hrvoje Niksic wrote:
Since Wget 1.10 also prints sizes in kilobytes/megabytes/etc., I am
thinking of removing the thousand separators from size display. The
reasons are:
* The separators need to be manually removed when the numbers are
pasted into any software that deals with numbers, such as "bc".
This problem was outweighed by their usefulness for gauging orders
of magnitude, but now that we also print sizes in human-readable
units, this advantage comes in question.
* The separators are interpunction which introduces clutter,
especially with complex size output also containing the "remaining"
size next to the whole size.
* There is pressure to replace the "," character with the character
mandated by the locale (e.g. http://tinyurl.com/8avkf). I've been
reluctant to do so because of my belief that basic properties of
Unix program's output, such as the display of numbers, should be, if
possible, unaffected by locale.
* I was surprised to learn (http://tinyurl.com/dlxtl) that some
cultures use "myriad separators" (which group together four digits)
rather than thousand separators. Of course, it is trivial to make
the grouping configurable, but the code would need to look at
obscure locale settings which, given the above, seems like more
trouble than it's worth.
What do you think?
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