From: Erik Naggum Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Subject: Re: Wish list item: , in integers made readable Date: 20 May 2000 18:42:59 +0000 Message-ID: <3167836979109935@naggum.no> * Robert Monfera | For what reason do you prefer the Anglo-Saxon way over the | Continental European (and I think ISO) notation? Well, to be honest: Because it doesn't suck. The European notation is ambiguous. In a list of numbers, "they" chose comma as the separator between numbers. Within a number, "they" then chose, what -- are we out of symbols, yet?, the _comma_ as the separator between integral and fractional part. That's, um -- I can't find the right phrasing for this -- that's ... that's f*cking _brilliant_! Arrrrgh, the braindamage! It's not unlike the massively non-brilliant decision to use the period in abbreviations as well as a sentence terminator. Had these people no imagination at _all_? When I was first exposed this utter stupidity in school, I asked my teacher why they had used the same symbol for two _completely_ different purposes that led to serious problems when the spaces were not all that obvious, as in handwriting. She had no answer, so I used a (normal) dot, because that's what my dad's adding machine used, and I was reprimanded because _raised_ dots were used for multiplication, which is another good reason not to trust Europeans when it comes to syntax (except me). This is one of the many good explanations why Europe is such a technological laggard, like some other cultures lack a sensible alphabetic writing system and lose out on the printing press and text processing. There are many ways to go wrong in _really_ obvious ways when it comes to writing down numbers. E.g., dates. Let's randomize the order of the day, the month, and the year! E.g., time of day. Let's start counting at 1, 12, or any other random number between -42 and 36! Let's chop the day in half and reuse the numbers -- that'll keep people from making naughty appointments in the evening or, god forbid, the wee hours of the night! I'm so totally _unsympathetic_ to the ways people write down dates and times and even amounts. (Who the hell had the fortitude of mind to think an apostrophe means thousand? How about using all of "K", "M", and "G" for thousand? Clearly, bigger numbers than that are incomprehensible, anyway, so let's get rid of _precision_. Yeah! Is a "mil" a million or a thousand or a _thousandth_ today? Gee, like, does it matter? Not to mention the amazing mental acuity of whoever couldn't even agree on whether a billion is a million or a thousand millions.) There is _one_ way to get dates and time right. Year, month, day. That's the ordering, and if your so-called "natural" language doesn't _speak_ them that way, grow a clue: you don't pronounce all the letters you write, and you don't talk like a book, either. And make that all numeric, please, years with four digits, month and day with two, with a leading zero if either is less than ten. Slashes were used to separate the _very_ silly monetary units of the British Empire. Now their money is worthless, the Empire is history, they figured out units of ten after, what, 40,000 years of inbreeding on their little island, and you realize, intuitively, how all of this is connected, so you just use a hyphen between elements of date, OK? Thank you. For some reason which probably proves the existence of several deities, almost all of mankind has figured out that it only makes sense to write time in the order hours, minutes, seconds. I marvel at the magnitude of this agreement. Of course, no such thing when it comes to how to separate hours from minutes. Now, let's just _not_ use a decimal point, OK? A colon will do just fine. Now, let's turn to history class and recall that once upon a time, the Romans changed their notion of the day of month at _noon_, which is why it makes sense to talk about ante meridiem and post meridiem to the _Romans_. But did their empire go the same way the British empire did a few years later? Yes! Was it because they couldn't count to 24? Yes! (Actually, they had such a screwed up calendar _and_ writing system for numbers that all the resources of the Roman empire was consumed by the predecessor to ISO when they sat down to decide how to write dates and times. To this day, the legacy of this tragic event lives on in newspapers who decry the failings and catastrophes of the world in Times Roman.) Now that we change the day at _midnight_, and we _can_ count to 24, and the meridiem isn't the meridiem at all because of such astute policial decision-making as the daylight savings time, it doesn't make sense to hold onto this AM/PM cruft any longer -- that is, unless you're a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism. It's not like I have this attachment to the Anglo-Saxon way over Continental European -- I prefer the previously-but-no-longer-French million, billion, trillion, etc, system, the "Anglo-Saxon" silliness in not even agreeing on the order of months and days is a blemish on something rather important, I'm sure, and I've already denounced the AM/PM silliness, and if nobody stops me, I'll get around to state _unequivocally_ just how resoundingly stupid using special symbols for currencies is. Use the frigging currency _codes_ you dimwits! It's not like there's enough free space in Unicode for all of your silly little countries and your worthless tin money! In brief, it's a fortuitous accident that the right way to do it is Anglo-Saxon and that Common Lisp doesn't have to suffer any of the completely _bogus_ ways to write large numbers (more) readably. I wouldn't trust the Anglo-Saxons for much anything else. Given they way English is spelled, who could trust them on _anything_ that had to do with writing things down, anyway? #:Erik -- If this is not what you expected, please alter your expectations.