The slashes are indeed common in practical figured bass (I wouldn't dare to say "most common", as there exist different traditions). That doesn't mean that the notation with accidentals is not used in practical figured bass just as well.John Ruggero wrote:
Actually, the numbers used with these clefs does not appear to be figured bass of the practical type at all, since #'s are used instead of the slashes through the numbers that are most common in figured bass notation.
That is an appallingly Anglocentric argument! We only need to think of all the Romanic languages, where (as far as I know) the words are read in the opposite order (e.g. "quinte diminuée").John Ruggero wrote:
For that reason, and also because we say (at least in English, it would be interesting to know about other languages) "play a flat-five" not play a "five flat" [...] I think that the numbers should display as in the figured bass used in music analysis.
I could also argue that it makes more sense to place the more significant symbol (the interval number) first, followed by the symbol (accidental) that qualifies the first symbol.
But since I am used to reading those symbols in either order, I don't really care. In fact I believe that a worldwide consensus on the symbol order will be impossible to ever achieve, precisely because of different usage in different languages.