@neal On semicolons: I hadn't really thought about them. Visually they're a bit busy for my taste, and I also worry that they already mean too many things in software: statement terminators, CSV-ish delimiters in some contexts, and so on. An underscore feels less likely to surprise people, though I may be overestimating how much that matters in practice.

On “East Asian”: I agree that's not quite right. What I really mean is something like “languages shaped by the Chinese classical counting tradition,” which gets Korean and Japanese in there too without making Chinese sound like the only center. But that's not exactly catchy. “Sinosphere” is probably the closest single word, but it has its own baggage and a lot of people won't know it. So I'm using “East Asian” as a rough placeholder for now, though I'm open to better suggestions. The Indic examples are a good parallel, especially lakh and crore, but I think they're a different enough system that I'd rather not fold them into this proposal.