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Misc. => Off-Topic => Topic started by: Cartman_Sr on 2006-12-04 00:59:36

Title: What's your decimal separator of choice?
Post by: Cartman_Sr on 2006-12-04 00:59:36
Considering that a LOT of countries are affected by the -A bug (almost every country in fact !), and


North America uses "." So it's not almost every country. 
Title: What's your decimal separator of choice?
Post by: Mangix on 2006-12-04 03:37:48

Considering that a LOT of countries are affected by the -A bug (almost every country in fact !), and


North America uses "." So it's not almost every country. 

he said a LOT, not almost every one. besides, north america has about 5 or 10 counries(USA, Canada, and Mexico being the biggest)

edit: spelling
Title: What's your decimal separator of choice?
Post by: Porcus on 2006-12-04 10:17:47
I think every country in Europe except the UK use "," as decimal separator.

The comma is the international standard (ISO 31).

(Myself I refuse to conform to it in Norwegian, as we generally use comma-delimited lists of numbers. So a list starting at 1 with 1/10 increments would have to look like {1, 1,1, 1,2, 1,3, ...}. Inconvenient. And semicolon-delimited lists are ugly.)
Title: What's your decimal separator of choice?
Post by: Maurits on 2006-12-04 11:57:44

Considering that a LOT of countries are affected by the -A bug (almost every country in fact !), and


North America uses "." So it's not almost every country. 

Well, if out of 200 countries only three use "." it is true almost every country uses ",". *

*) just made up figures to state my point and the meaning of "almost". The real situation is a little bit more complex (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Dot_countries).
Title: What's your decimal separator of choice?
Post by: Jose Hidalgo on 2006-12-04 12:09:55
That's exactly what I meant. Thanks Maurits.
Title: What's your decimal separator of choice?
Post by: tgoose on 2006-12-04 14:49:51
Since China and India both use the . as a decimal seperator I think it's fair to say the number of people using one or the other is not as obviously biased towards one or the other...
Title: What's your decimal separator of choice?
Post by: j7n on 2006-12-04 15:19:09
You can't say for sure that a whole “country” is using comma. There are other software, mostly databases and spreadsheets designed to work with the default kbd layout, where dot is assigned to Gray(.).

I live in LV. Yet I refuse to accept this ISO 31 because:
- The "." was a de facto standard in computers before anybody paid attention to languages and locales.
- Choice of decimal separator doesn't matter much in handwritten text.
- Keyboard layout with Gray(.) remapped to comma decreases typing speed of IP addresses.
- Nobody can expect United States, UK, China and India to switch the separator.
- Choice between dot and comma shouln't be part of any language.

Today FLAC approves my choice to be right.
Title: What's your decimal separator of choice?
Post by: pepoluan on 2006-12-05 00:46:01
My country's standard decimal point is the comma, but we're so used to US punctuation (and calculators) that when dealing with electronic equipment, we used "." as the decimal point.

However, the national standard is "," and all scientific documents and/or official documents must use "," for decimal point.

So I personally went the French way to prevent confusion between using "," as a decimal point or thousands separator.
Title: What's your decimal separator of choice?
Post by: kjoonlee on 2006-12-05 09:43:01
South Korea uses the decimal point, and uses the comma to separate places in groups of three digits.

123,456,789.0123

However, counting in the Korean language is done in groups of four digits, so 123,456,789.0123 is read like "1 eok 2345 man 6789 jeom 0 1 2 3." It'd be much simpler if we used 1,2345,6789.0123, but we don't.
Title: What's your decimal separator of choice?
Post by: pepoluan on 2006-12-05 12:34:13
@kjoonlee: You should read how the Indians split their numbers on wikipedia!

Also according to wikipedia, the Chinese actually group numbers by the 4's.
Title: What's your decimal separator of choice?
Post by: evereux on 2006-12-05 15:08:00
In the aerospace industry in the UK we generally use a . to denote inches and a , to denote millimetres as the decimal seperator.
Title: What's your decimal separator of choice?
Post by: Scrith on 2006-12-05 21:43:37
This seems like a text problem (tukey(0,5) is being interpreted at tukey(0.5) in some cases).  Why not specify the command-line option like this:  tukey(0, 5)
Title: What's your decimal separator of choice?
Post by: legg on 2006-12-06 01:17:21
Over here we use the form 1,234,567.89

It just looks wrong to see 0,5 to express 1/2, but that's just me.
Title: What's your decimal separator of choice?
Post by: kjoonlee on 2006-12-06 03:00:44
@kjoonlee: You should read how the Indians split their numbers on wikipedia!

Also according to wikipedia, the Chinese actually group numbers by the 4's.

Yeah it's pretty amazing. The [[Kajol]] article says "1 [[crore]] (10 million) rupees" instead of "10 million rupees!"

Korea and Japan use the Chinese system too for large numbers, BTW.