🚀 go-pugleaf

Dr John Stockton <spam@merlyn.demon.co.uk> wrote in message news:<u3nHhzCMyOeBFwpF@merlyn.demon.co.uk>...
> 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?

Why would I 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.

That is because the market for computer hardware and software was and
still is largely US-dominated. I am not a computer expert, but the way
numbers are internally stored in a computer is not really important to
the user (or is it?). Keyboards in continental Europe have the comma
on the number pad and the comma has to be used as decimal marker for
data entry (try online banking in France or Switzerland, for example).
There are some poorly-localized stand-alone solutions, such as cash
registers or pocket calculators, but they don't create ambiguity as
they don't use commas as digit grouping sympbol.


Regards,

Chris Kaese