There truly is an XKCD for everything...

The subreddit law of comics (lemmy communities just can't reach that level for now)

Relevant video by mad lad Tom7: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLRdruqQfRk

☺☻♥♦♣♠•◘○

As far as I know, that is the 'number case'. Where the difference between upper and lower case is defined based on alignment of the numbers with baseline of typography.

I think the post is taking about 'letter case'. Which we commonly use to yell at people through text. I don't think there is an equivalent like that in case of numbers. Mainly because numbers came from languages which are unicase by default. Like the Indian languages and Arabic.

6 and 8 being all “no one tells me what to do!” and staying the same.

IDK, I don't think old style and lining figures are analogous to lower- and uppercase letters. They're not really different glyphs, at least not like lower- and uppercase letters are, and I would see them more as different ways of typesetting the same glyph.

Edit: Wikipedia does not agree with me.

The typical use for the "lower case" numbers is in body copy, because that style of number fits in better with the old style and transitional fonts that are typically used there. So, you are most likely to see them when you are reading a book or an article, but not in the headlines or chapter titles.

Source: just sat through a lecture on this last week in Intro Typography.

Neat-lowercase0

iii III!

It's made up numbers anyway...

Big difference there, those are

120

3628800

$253? Try, SEVENTEEN THOUSAND EIGHT HUNDRED AND NINETY SIX DOLLARS!

陸柒 (/s)

That explains a lot. It turns out people often switch to upper case speaking numbers to me.

EIGHT

What if the number is negative, do I say "-|42|?"

XXXXII!!!!!!! So simple!

Although, the romans never saw one trillion anything.

VXXXII!

SIX SEVEN EIGHT NINE TEN, ELEVEN TWELVE

For some reason this reminds me of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL](the COBOL programming language), though not even COBOL was batshit enough to use numerals written in plain English. Everything else was in plain English, though, which was supposed to make it easier to read and write, but is in reality a horrible idea.

Though all caps just reminds me of early programming languages in general, since we didn't separate uppercase and lowercase in all machines back then, instead using encoding schemes like DEC SIXBIT. Saving memory by using only six bits per character instead of seven or eight, and such. Six bit characters had matching word lengths, before the concept of a byte there used to be loads of 12-bit and 36-bit architectures, that more-or-less went away when the industry almost collectively decided to take byte-addressed memory into use.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRuVjJTjszM

I'm ethnic Chinese* and I'm entering the chat

(*Chinese American)

And I'll conquer the fediverse with 壹貳參肆伍陸柒捌玖拾

Yup, typographers differentiate lowercase and uppercase numerals. Lowercase 9 goes below the baseline though, 6oo is a better example.

Oh so that's what exponents are for. They're just lowercase numbers in the sky.

What is it good for?

Absolutely nothing

Because of redundancy. Modern written language has a lot of features that make it easier to read, that were added as society became more literal. Things like capitalization, punctuation (a surprisingly recent addition), even separately marking vowels wasn't a given for all writing systems (see old Hebrew as an example). Capital letter in the start of a sentence saves you from picking that up from context, especially when coupled together with the stop (.) signifying the end of it. Redundancy is actually a very natural phenomenon, and spoken language has loads more compared to written examples.

It's complexity that aids the understanding, trading some of the simplicity and speed of writing to better reading comprehension. As per why capital and lowercase, in latin script capitals are derived from the letters that were chiseled, lowercase used to be just a handwritten thing. Written language naturally evolved to make use of these two systems to aid in reading. So things like capitalization are actually completely opposite from added complexity, actually making the language easier to comprehend after a bit of an initial learning curve.

Because English is weird, in Chinese Language, it doesn't even need much spacing between words and you can write it vertically or read right to left. Lol

It makes things with several sentences easier to read.

They actually are. And there are lowercase numbers in several fonts, which people really should use more.