Re: decimal separator (international?

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Fri, 29 Oct 2004 14:41:53 GMT, Bj�rn Persson wrote:

> Peter Hermann wrote:
>> In comp.lang.ada Markus Kuhn <n04W44+mgk25@cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>> 
>>>Gigapounds and teradollars seem perfectly acceptable solutions
>> 
>> clever   :-)  :-)
>> 
>> but:
>> giga or gibi ?
>> tera or tebi ?
> 
> I suppose you can talk about gibipounds and tebidollars if you like, but 
> why? We need those prefixes for things that occur in powers of two for 
> technical reasons, like memory cells. I see no reason to talk about 
> money in powers of two.

The power used is arbitrary and can be voluntarily chosen as it happened in
SI, but only for continuous values, such as physical measures. Once you
leave the realm of real numbers and enter discrete mathematics (and
computing), things change. Well, you can say that you do not want to write
banking software (neither I), but in that case "damn much" will fit
perfectly. Anyway dollar is not a SI unit. Yottadollar, attodollar sound
silly. Maybe some day, after we'll stop using km/h, mph instead of m/s, Bar
instead of hPa and year instead of Ms...

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de