Look at the number in this line

There are 4183423 things in the box

How long did it take you to mentally make sense of that number?

Was it 41 million, 4.1 million, or 418k?

It took me a second. I'm sure many of you didn't even bother to read it out loud in your head. It requires too much effort.

Perhaps that’s why we separate them by commas?

There are 23,394,249 things in the box

I like this representation because it immediately shows how large the number is.

However, it has a few drawbacks. For starters, you cannot double-click the entire number to select it. Additionally, you cannot copy and paste it into a calculator without first removing the commas.

How about this?

There are 23.3 million things in the box.

Its quite readable, but still not copy-paste-able and there’s some loss of precision.

This one is slightly better

There are 4183423 things in the box

It fixes the double-click and copy-paste problems. Looks a little awkward for sure. Might be confusing to new readers. Doesn’t work if the entire line is underlined.