Subject: Re: Integer with base preserved! From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 23 Jan 2004 07:54:31 +0000 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3283833271270429KL2065E@naggum.no> * Pascal Bourguignon | I don't know, what are the difference in English and US numbers? The English-speaking part of the world have enormous problem counting any higher than 20, which explains their Fred Flintstone Units and their irrational resistance to units that tends to yield measurements with values having more than 1 significant digits and their hostility towards the French for having invented smarter units, but strangely, they adopted the old French way to count large numbers, using the number of thousand groups: A million is a thousand thousand, a billion is a thousand million, a trillion is a thousand billion, etc, while the French changed their ways in 1948 to count the number of millions, so a million is a thousand thousand, a billion is a million million, and a trillion is a million billion. You may note that new trillion has three million groups, and that this pattern is a lot more sensible than the the old trillion which has /four/ thousand groups. So when the U.S. federal deficit is two trillion dollars, is appears to Europeans to be a million times larger than it really is, which is probably the only good thing you could say about it. -- Erik Naggum | Oslo, Norway Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder. Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.