Gunnar, I wrote the text below a few days ago and then decided not to post it but your follow-up post on international characters made me change my mind. It doesn't give you much help but might show that others face the same sorts of problems and that they can be "solved" although not without a certain amount of pain:
==================================================== For what it's worth - not much, probably - when the multi-national company that I used to work for had the problem that you have with currency and date formats we had to make a choice: Either: try and satisfy everyone and probably fail and cause other problems, or: impose a solution that worked but meant some people had to change their way of doing things. We were three British companies with world-wide subsiduaries that had been amalgamated and subsequently purchased by an American company but run, more or less, from the UK and then, later, with an HQ in the USA. After various cosultations we decided that our three global areas (the Americas; Europe, Middle East & Africa; Asia-Pacific) should do their local thing based on the area's HQ. So the Americas did it the US way, Europe did it the British way and Asia-Pacific did it the Singaporean (?) way. The reasoning being that reporting to an area HQ was all done the same way and then only the reports that went on to the overall HQ had to be converted to the "company" format. For lots of things the locals could do much their own way but linked computer systems had to be done the "HQ way" - for Europe this meant that almost everyone had to do something different to fit in with the British way as nearly all of Europe used points for thousand separators and commas for decimals. The Swedish date format also had to be changed to dd/mm/yyyy. All in all it was a right pain but the systems all talked to each other and saved a lot of time in the long run. The problem of currency formats was not only a problem in R:Base, however, and most, if not all, computer systems coped one way or another with some sort of compromise. Accents and special alphabet characters were a particular nightmare everywhere they were used! We banned them! Made us really popular, too! Whilst I agree that every option should be supported it's not really practical every time. That said, it really ought not to be too difficult for any program to know when a value is a currency and ignore the thousands and decimal separators except when displaying them. One piece of software the company used stored all currency values as 18 digits with the last three used for the decimal value. If you wanted 4 decimal places or more than 15 digits you were out of luck but the separators were whichever way you wanted and could be changed at any time! (A word of warning here: be very careful if you change the number of currency decimals in R:Base when you have values in tables. I haven't tried it recently, but it used to just move the decimal point so a value of 1000.00 would become 10.0000 if you changed it from 2 to 4.) Regards, Alastair. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gunnar Ekblad" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, November 07, 2002 11:23 AM Subject: SV: Currency convention (A) should be independent of delimiter char (,) Hi This is what I submitted to RDCC today " 1. IN rbase-l there has been a lengty discuusion on this subject. 2. For the win version : If I do set curr ' ' pre 2 C I will have warning 398, If I do the same from the menu I will recive warning 402. Mixup with delim char. 3. If in my windows setting I choose decimal point and thousand space (corresponding to set curr ' ' pre 2 B) and start for exampel Excel my decimal comma on my nueric keypad is converted to decimal point. Rbase for WIN does not do that. I expect R:Base to behave like most other windowsprograms. 4. I myself are using the B standrad in Rbase. In R:Base for dos I have solved the problem with a freeware converting the mummeric keypad for me. The reason I USE RBase B convention is to be able to the delimit comma. If I could keep the delimit comma with Rbase setting C for currency I would do that since the C setting correspond to swedish standard. Since I decide to try to realy move to windows with upcomming 7.0 I need really one of two things A. If i run convention B to replace my decimal sign on the numeric keypad to what I stated in the windows setting or B. to able to run C convention (or A) but at same time keep the delimit to comma " Guunar -----Ursprungligt meddelande----- Fr�n: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:owner-rbase-l@;sonetmail.com] F�r ELOEN Skickat: den 7 november 2002 11:51 Till: [EMAIL PROTECTED] �mne: RE: Currency convention (A) should be independent of delimiter char (,) > I stand corrected > Even the windows version (not only DOS) of 6.5++ has problems with curr > format A or C that gives the decimal komma (,)I agree with the Greek > viewpoint I haven't given the problem any thought for the last say 5 > years since I convinced my users to accept f0rmat B with decimal point. > It is okey to wait to 7.9 version for this issue to be resolved > Gunnar > Dear Gunnar, thanks for your reply. Finally the people that are concerned about currency format, are more than I first thought and they 've learned to live with it. What exactly were the problems with the win 6.5++ Rbase, related to currency format? Polychronis T. 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