Well-put. I participated in a protracted comment thread several weeks ago about the use of 'number' in HTML input field 'type' attributes. The problem was inexperienced HTML writers using 'type=number' for phone numbers, order numbers, social security numbers, account numbers, etc. The resulting interface elements— e.g. increment/decrement— are designed for elements like quantities and are more harmful than helpful with those more common uses.<p>I argued that in general, people are perfectly correct in calling telephone numbers, order numbers, account numbers, social security numbers, etc. "numbers" regardless of how a computer handles them. I also argued that the purpose of HTML was to describe data rather than how it should be handled, and that argument is to describe formatting rather than a data type. I asserted that a general-use term like "number" was wrong for a field with such specific use cases obvious only to developers.<p>Personally, I think the shakiest part of my argument was asserting the purpose of that label. To my surprise, others only argued that labelling those other things 'numbers' was not accurate <i>in general</i> because computers didn't treat them like numbers, and supported the current label 'text.'<p>OED definition 3a for number:
<i>> An arithmetical value assigned to something or someone, esp. to indicate position in a series, or for purposes of reference, identification, etc.</i><p><i>There is no definition for 'text' in the unabridged OED that describes anything other than words.</i><p>English is a descriptive language and software doesn't override that. Most people see a collection of numerals with punctuation and think "that's a number" and that's clearly how we use the term in regular language. "Order Number" and "Telephone Number" (3b for 'number' in the OED) are not colloquialisms. The most common uses for fields those developers would consider 'real numbers' — e.g. quantity— don't even have the word 'number' in the name.<p>I don't even expect most developers to intuitively recognize how these ingrained shorthands differ from the rest of the world, but we MUST NOT instinctively dismiss indicators that our perspective isn't representative. We're making the tools modern folks use to solve many of their problems and we stand to make their lives a lot worse by assuming our use cases, language, challenges, and perspectives are the same <i>or more</i> worth considering.