🚀 go-pugleaf

JRS:  In article <d4a75c1f.0410211134.18d469cb@posting.google.com>,
dated Thu, 21 Oct 2004 12:34:40, seen in news:borland.public.delphi.inte
rnationalization.general, Chris Kaese <cdkaese@ntlworld.com> posted :

>Ideally, when considering which standard should become universal or
>whether a new standard should be drawn up, one should aim at improving
>things or at least select the best current standard.
>If it's simply a question of majority, the comma wins hands down as
>decimal separator (in terms of countries using it vs. countries using
>the period).

It's hardly reasonable to give a country such as San Marino or Somalia
the same weight as is given to China and India, though.  And do you
count Wales as a country?

Better to weight countries according to population.

Better still to weight according to GDP, which takes into account, in
practice and approximately, the total numeric activity.

One should note, however, that while the British use only the dot as a
decimal separator, the Continentals use both the comma and the dot.
They use the comma "publicly"; but within their computing they use the
dot, and that is economically important.

AFAIK, Delphi can multi-nationalise I/O, so that x:=3/2 is output as
'1,5'; but there is no provision for   const z : real = 1,5 ;  within a
Continental Delphi program.

(BTW, I once saw a book on a French version of Algol 60, in which the
reserved words had been translated (IMHO badly)).


The comma is used as a list separator - a sentence is a list of part-
sentences separated by commas, and may contain a list of items - and
UK/US usage in numbers marches this, as the comma divides a list of what
are effectively base-1K digits.  OTOH, the decimal point is too small
for that use - and in many fonts, the full stop is too small for its
purpose too.  In Windows Times New Roman HTML, sentence separation is
ungenerous and can be inadequate.
 
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