Re: Datasheet-flation?

You left out zillion, gazillion, jillion, gajillion, bazillion, bajillion, ad absurdum. These are very large numbers waiting to be defined and appear in common use. They are useful for projecting the size of the US national debt:

That may be what will save them. Animals that taste good don't go extinct. But what a destiny...

Jeroen Belleman

Dodos did-did.

I wonder if any animals have evolved to taste bad. Or be outright poisonous.

Plants do that.

Some frogs and insects.

Jeroen Belleman

If only people all used metric prefixes, and used them consistently.

In POSIX, first formally standardized in 1988, it was necessary to avoid the word billion. POSIX was originally written in California English, not EU English.

Joe Gwinn

Try this:

Yes. But they are technical documents that make at least some attempt to clarity (possibly limited to avoiding commas in numbers).

I saw result from translating a chinese datasheet, did not look nice, but one could get from it useful info.

I suspect that some do. Not when there is international cooperation or they want to sell code. Of course syntax is standard but comments and variable names may be in Polish.

I am using ngspice which I think is English only.

EU has English as one of official languages, but it is subtly different from British English and more from American English.

And concerning datasheets, a lot of datasheets is Chinese only.

We use a mixed language (Spain).

If you use software like Libre Office spreadsheets, numbers are automatically printed in the local style, unless you specify to use some other locale, say British. But then you get other problems, like wrong spelling, or wrong monetary unit. You might choose a customized locale so that only numbers are USA style, but then it might print dollars instead of euros...

It is not that simple.

On another era, when we started to use calculators, we started to use the dot for decimals, instead of the comma. This was a problem with strict teachers.

Then you have cash registers...

Oh, programming language. Some decades ago, Telefónica had the software translated. The commands of the Lucent machine (5ESSS) were in Spanish. That must have been really expensive to do.

It just repeats the myth but doesn't give a reference.

True, there are several (each one official in their regions, and Spanish in all), but the point I live at it is only Spanish. Other regions are bilingual; but if they are programmers they probably use a mixture of English and the local language. Documentation is often in English, and even when not, the most recent version of the docs is in English usually. Unless the software you are using originated in non English country.

...

A fish, that is a delicatessen in Japan, is deadly poisonous. Fugu, I think it is.

Makes sense that you would use net names and variable names and make comments in a comfortable language, but you probably have to use compilers whose keywords and commands are in English.

I have rarely seen an online engineering app in another language. Good thing for me; I hate music and can't learn languages. French almost flunked me out of high school.

Puffer fish, right.

Has anyone tried it? I've never seen it here in California.

I like eel; we get that on Dragon Rolls.

It's not a myth. UK and US billions have been harmonized at 1,000,000,000 for as long as I can remember now. As I recall, it was just done simply via adoption rather than any Act of Parliament or Statutory Instrument. IIRC, I think the pressure to do so came from the finance industry.

Do you have a reference that isn't just heresay?

In theory, they all have also to handle Spanish.

Depends... some are more fierce than others, and also depends on who won the last election :-)

For example, you know that there are many distributions of Linux. Well, some of these regionalities did their own distributions, properly translated to their language. Or, they funded translators that submitted their translations upstream.

They may be better (more complete) translated than to Spanish itself.

Right.

Not everybody, but yes.

My own code can be in Spanglish :-p

You can go to BBC.com and search for stories with "billions". They obviously mean 1e9.

Yep, or Financial Times will be liberally sprinkled with it, too.