Originally Posted by
nkedel
Gotta be careful with those, since a lot of folks don't understand that computer guys sometimes mean the decimal units everyone else does (10**3/6/9/12... how storage is usually sold) and sometimes mean the binary approximations of those (2**10/20/30/40... how memory is usually sold.)
Quite right.
Originally Posted by
nkedel
But "a billion" is much shorter to write than "a thousand million," and besides, there are very few things where anyone needs to scale over 10**12, so running out of terms isn't much of an issue, while being unnecessarily wordy at the short end of the scale is.
The old alternative term for 10**9, a "milliard" is pretty much extinct, which might be a decent compromise otherwise, since it solves the wordiness problem.
You forgot hundred thousand millions.
I can't argue that a thousand million is easier to say than a billion. The main point of this thread was that nomenclature varies. Even with millard, we would still have hundred thousand millions.
While it's true that 10**12 is about the limit of the scale as things stand today. For many of Americans, even 10**6 is meaningless in everyday life. But 10**12 is in no way an absolute limit. Didn't Zimbabwe have a trillion dollar bill? Hyperinflation usually end up changing the currency, bringing down the number of zeroes necessary.
Originally Posted by
nkedel
Which is itself rather counter-intuitive, since every other common scale has its log10 evenly divisible by 3.
I'd be cautious about making such a claim. There are widely used scales that groups digits by twos. Gogool is made up word, even less counter-intuitive than zillion.
Originally Posted by
nkedel
Perhaps the clearest answer is to write everything out as in a check: 12,345.67 (twelve thousand three hundred fourty five and 67/100)
That requires unnecessary use of as many extra symbols as the number of digits in the fractional part or the number. Any symbol can be used, as long as it avoids confusion. I find both practices, using a full stop or comma to use for decimal separator to be odd. A dot, at at height half the height of characters above the baseline works fine.