🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <840@rtech.UUCP> jeff@rtech.UUCP writes:
>> >I for one am glad that the pound sign (on my US-made VT100) is NOT on
>> >the same key as the dollar sign, as I often have to use both in the
>> >same document - e.g.  when preparing purchasing budgets etc. for
>> >US-made gear where both dollar and sterling prices are shown.
>> 
>> ... Not to mention that if I send a letter from the USA to my
>> potential client in London saying something will cost $1000, and it
>> looks to him like it will cost 1000 pounds because his terminal draws a
>> pound sign where I put a $ sign ... just imagine the confusion.
>
>What if you want to correspond with someone in Japan?  Where should the yen
>sign be?  (A yen sign is a capital Y with a line through it).  Should the
>character set contain all three symbols, just in case?

I don't think it's any good idea to have a general "currency symbol" in
the character set, with different outlook (and meaning too) in different
countries. According to previous opinions posted, having dollar and pound
signs in different places seems convenient and might have prevented some
confusion reading texts on financial subjects (not being able to display
the pound and sharp signs in the same document seems to be a smaller
problem, though it's not a good solution either).

Yes, if we want to represent all those funny signs we should have different
places for them. They simply aren't the same.

>How do you guys in Europe handle this problem?  Each of the national character
>sets has a symbol for the currency of its own country, doesn't it?

Not all of them. Swedish "crowns" are usually abbreviated    $     $
"kr", or nowadays often "SEK". We don't have any special     $ $$$ $
symbol for it. On European style keyboards, the $ symbol      $   $
is often replaced by the "sun" character (matrix right).      $   $
I don't know why, or what meaning it is supposed to have.     $   $
In VMS there is a logical symbol SYS$CURRENCY (I think)      $ $$$ $
which should be defined as a character string representing   $     $
the currency in use at the site (for the system accounting
routines, I guess).

Spanish pesetas is written using the ligature "Pt", which might be in
need for a special symbol in the ultimate character set. By the way,
"pounds" and "dollars" of various kinds are used in a lot of countries,
but do they use the symbols of British Pound Sterling and US Dollars,
respectively, in Canada, Australia and <a few old British colonies>?
-- 
Anders Andersson, Dept. of Computer Systems, Uppsala University, Sweden
Phone: +46 18 183170
UUCP: andersa@kuling.UUCP (...!{seismo,mcvax}!enea!kuling!andersa)