Re: ARMS WAVING!!! Proposal to fix /proc dainbrammage.

Linus Torvalds (torvalds@transmeta.com)
Fri, 23 Oct 1998 18:28:42 -0700 (PDT)

On Sat, 24 Oct 1998, Richard Gooch wrote:
> Tim Smith writes:
> >
> > Actually, don't a lot of people think that 123.456 is an integer between
> > 123000 and 124000, and that 123,456 is a floating point number somewhere
> > between 123 and 124? This is the only possible objection I can think of
> > to having numbers formatted for humans in /proc, and it is a pretty lame
> > objection, but for completelness, I thought it should be pointed out.
>
> No, 123.456 is a number between 123 and 124. 123,456 is in fact a
> co-ordinate pair (123 for the first axis, 456 for the second).

No. In most of europe (except when it comes to computers), the "." is the
"thousand-separator" and the "," is the decimal point (except they call it
the "decimal comma" in the appropriate language).

Computers are making this less common, though, and most Europeans have
essentially switched over to the anglo-saxon decimal point with a
half-space for the thousand-separator. At least that is how it appeared to
me.

So Tim is right in that to some people 123,456 is actually the fractional
number 123 + (456/1000). However, being computer people we can pretty much
ignore it.

Linus

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