My reasoning is that the period is a "stronger" punctuation mark than the comma, and it should be used for the more important separation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator

  • kleeon [he/him, he/him]
    ·
    2 days ago

    yeah "easier" was not the right word. I meant comma has been historically used as a seperator for lists of values(which I think makes a lot of sense).

    It's not really just one character tho since with comma as a decimal point separator, something like "100,200" can be interpreted either as a number or a list of two number. For example with Excel, geniuses at microsoft decided to replace comma with a semicolon for some localizations which makes the program really annoying to use across multiple languages

    Edit: sorry I'm very sleep deprived so I'm not sure if any of it makes sense. To clarify: I'm assuming that comma as list separator makes sense because there is essentially no debate over "comma" vs "some other list separator", however there is such a debate for decimal separator. Having the same symbol mean two different things makes text harder to parse

    • mayo_cider [he/him]
      ·
      2 days ago

      Fair enough, although I wouldn't use excel as an example, it's most likely going to interpret it as a date no matter what you type

      Honestly the optimal solution would be just letting the user type in a number, visually adding the spaces and taking either comma or period as the decimal marker

      This brought back my biggest grievance with parsing numbers, chat apps interpreting any 5+ character long numbers as phone numbers

      No, I don't want to call 10.000

      • kleeon [he/him, he/him]
        ·
        2 days ago

        I wouldn't use excel as an example, it's most likely going to interpret it as a date no matter what you type

        I mentioned excel because it's been my arch enemy for the past 3 years to the point where I had to spend a substantial amount of time writing my own library for reading excel files maddened The thing I'm specifically talking about is how formulas may look different across localizations. For example the sum function looks as follows in english:

        =SUM(1,2,3)

        while in russian it looks like this:

        =СУММ(1;2;3)

        and excel will not allow you to type the english version

        This brought back my biggest grievance with parsing numbers, chat apps interpreting any 5+ character long numbers as phone numbers

        No, I don't want to call 10.000

        funnily enough, phone number parsing is one of my previous arch enemies. Having to turn whaterver bullshit user has typed into a phone number probably reduced my life expectancy by several months

        • mayo_cider [he/him]
          ·
          2 days ago

          I feel you, I nowadays prefer doing the calculations in python and export the results in .csv for the freaks who prefer excel

          funnily enough, phone number parsing is one of my previous arch enemies. Having to turn whaterver bullshit user has typed into a phone number probably reduced my life expectancy by several months

          This reminds me of my futile attempts of parsing URLs with regex in my teenage years when I was trying to make a guestbook for my website with PHP (the solution is .*\..*)