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From: Jeroen Belleman <jeroen@nospam.please>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: Datasheet-flation?
Date: Sun, 24 Nov 2024 00:30:02 +0100
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On 11/23/24 23:31, Joe Gwinn wrote:
> On Sat, 23 Nov 2024 22:02:07 +0000, liz@poppyrecords.invalid.invalid
> (Liz Tuddenham) wrote:
> 
>> Waldek Hebisch <antispam@fricas.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Don Y <blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> wrote:
>>>> The data "sheet" for the new processor I'm using is ~16,000 pages.
>>>> (note carefully the position of the comma separator)
>>>
>>> In my country people would ask why are you putting decimal
>>> comma in a number that is supposed to be an integer?
>>
>> It's a convention used in banking and accountancy to divide the '0's
>> into groups of three and make them easier to count with less chance of
>> error.  It is also used by newspapers and sometimes in ordinary
>> correspondence but very rarely in scientific communications, where the
>> 10^x notation is preferred.  The decimal divider in English is the
>> full-stop [American: "period"]
>>
>> Also be aware that the term "Billion" means a million million
>> (Bi-million) in English but only a thousand million in American and
>> French..  Most English people seem ignorant of this and use it
>> incorrectly with the American meaning.
> 
> True.  In IEEE computer standards such as 1003.1 (POSIX/Linux), the
> word billion is not used, replaced by a thousand million.  In related
> documents, I usually also say something like "billion (10^9)" to be
> precise.
> 
> Joe Gwinn

I'd use metric prefixes. So 10^9 is 1G and 10^12 is 1T. I even
wrote a desktop calculator program styled after Unix's 'dc' that
uses that notation.

Jeroen Belleman