One of the things that is really annoying to me is how some countries use the . and the , differently. I think, and I'm not 100% sure on this, that some places say ten thousand as 10.000 , and some places say 10,000.
When I operated a very large chemical plant we would often input flows and setpoints into the DCS (digital control system) like 22,450 lb/hr or 435,000 lb/hr or whatever the number happened to be. Sometimes it would be 4,400,000 lb/hr. You get the idea.
Anyways, looking at the display, all you would see is 22500 or 222500 or 2225500 or some such. No commas. When I asked about it, like why can't we have commas I was told that some countries use commas as decimals and vice versa. So they wanted to avoid confusion since we have units all over the world. Never made sense to me, we don't display everything else in other languages. Also, NOBODY that is not certified to operate the plant would ever make any changes to the system, including our engineers without express consent of the designated operator. Obviously, certain people were granted very heavy leeway, but somebody from another plant couldn't just come in and start changing stuff.
What made it even more silly is we did have flows where the output would be only a few lbs/hr, and we would have to input something like 5.25 lb/hr so then we would need to input the decimal. Made no sense that we cold input something with a decimal, but couldn't display anything with a comma.
