I'm not good at counting. When I see a number like 1048576 I don't immediately see "that's around 1 million"; I'd have to count the digits first.

So I usually use either scientific notation - 1.05e6, or I use suffixes - the number above is about 1m.

So, why not use suffixes in code?

The other day somebody told me his blog had 16k visitors one day, and I wondered how many per second that was: 

use v6;

my $unit = 1_000;

sub postfix:<k>($x) { $x * $unit    };
sub postfix:<m>($x) { $x * $unit**2 };
sub postfix:<b>($x) { $x * $unit**3 };

sub postfix:<h>($x) { $x * 3600 };

say 16k / 24h;
# output: 0.185185185185185

[download]

Ok, I usually wouldn't write it like that in a normal program, but I still like it as a toy, and I was amazed that it works today with rakudo.

Perl 6 - links to (nearly) everything that is Perl 6.

In reply to [Perl 6] Order-of-magnitude suffixes for big numbers by moritz

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