by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2008/03/01 10:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/03/01/7966892.aspx
Please read the disclaimer; content not approved by Microsoft!
The other day, a friend of mine over on facebook asked me about the Proud to be a BANGLADESHI: Can We Get 1,00,000 Proud Bangladeshies??? group there on facebook.
They knew I was not from Bangladesh -- I have not even yet had the chance to get to Bangladesh or Bengal to even visit, so l definitely am not from either -- my barely useful Bengali reading skills are further proof if any is needed.
And there are no aardvarks in either place as far as I know!
But that was not their question.
What they wanted to know was whether the group name was a typo.
Clearly, they are not from Bangladesh either!
The number in the title:
1,00,000
is simply the way the grouping component of the number format works for the locale.
Of course the group count and other pieces of facebook do not format numbers, dates, or times according to cultural preferences, so none of these values will look right in any of the facebook groups or other pages....
So even the group count, which does not look wrong yet, will look wrong to any self-respecting person from Bangladesh when their numbers increase high enough to reach their goals!
So why is the notion of following cultural conventions in display text so frowned upon here, exactly? It won't even do European rules about decimal and grouping separators. :-(
My friend may not have found ১,০০,০০০ to be much better since he does not know Bengali numbers! :-)
Now if you see me type the number, your odds are probably 50/50 -- it may be me formatting an Indic number. Or it may well be a typo!
This blog brought to you by ১ (U+09e7, aka BENGALI DIGIT ONE)
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