On Wed, 6 Oct 2004 19:39:21 +0200, Jens Ropers ropers@ropersonline.com wrote:
What '''drives me NUTS''' however is the "traditional" usage, whereby you have:
million 10^6 1,000,000 milliard 10^9 1,000,000,000 billion 10^12 1,000,000,000,000 billiard 10^15 1,000,000,000,000,000 trillion 10^18 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 trilliard 10^21 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 etc.
-- this effectively uses a "duodecimal" system as it were.
I guess I've always thought of it as million -> billion -> trillion as adding 6 noughts at a time, and the rest just kind of "filling in" in between. It's still not really a decimal vs something else distinction, but I see what you mean. It's more like Roman numerals than anything else, with the X and V, C and L, M and D, etc