...and it really is a pain in the ass - excuse the rough language. Ten to fifteen years ago things were simple: when it came to computers you could count on the fact that a decimal point was the decimal separator and there was no separator between thousands.
The computers became a bit more powerful and some software was "polite" enough to accept the official decimal comma, which is tought to every school child at least in Germany and Sweden (I cannot speak for the rest of Europe). But by far not all. The worst thing was that the decimal separator on the numeric part of the IBM keyboard was a comma - but only few programs accepted it as separator. So if you really (like me) used this keypad a lot, you still had to get the point from the regular keypad... Under MS DOS you could patch a certain file and made the key to a point - Billy took away this possibility with Windows.... Nowadays you can adjust the predefined regional settings in Windows and Linux and choose the combinations which suits you best - but then there are programs around, which ignore those individual settings and instead apply their own regional defaults.There seems e.g. no way to get OpenOffice to accept a decimal point in conjunction with Swedish or German national settings like currency and/or date, time,... So please, I would like to have it all: - decimal point instead of comma - SI units - ISO date/time - 24h instead of am/pm - metric screws and bolts - inches for waiste and inseam in trousers - inches for the measures of harddisks and floppies - 240V/50Hz mains - the Euro as the national currency even in Sweden - driving on the right(!) side of the road - no SPAM Uwe. Tac> For those of you in Europe: Is there some sort of Tac> formalized convention on the usage of a comma to separate Tac> integers from decimals in a number? Tac> I wonder if it has something to do with using SI units. I Tac> say this because I have a digital caliper that when switched to Tac> millimeters, it changes the decimal point to a comma. Tac> Here in the US as you know it is more prevalent the use of Tac> the decimal point and the comma to separate the thousands, as in Tac> $1,000.00 Tac> I can see the practicality of using a decimal comma as it Tac> is less probable to be a printing mistake compared to the decimal Tac> point. Tac> This must be a pain to Casio making different calculators for the US and Europe. Tac> By the way, I am a metric freak, which my AutoCAD friends Tac> here at work do not appreciate, however I can't see myself going Tac> to the decimal comma. It just seems unnatural, like driving on Tac> the left side of the road (joke by the way). -- Author: Uwe Zimmermann INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Hosting, San Diego, California -- http://www.fatcity.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB CHIPDIR-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).
