Thanks Justin The combined population of the following countries (in billions) China = 1.25 India = 1.00 USA = 0.28 Pakistan = 0.14 Japan = 0.12 Bangladesh = 0.12 UK = 0.06 South Africa = 0.04 gives 3 billion (50 % of world population) who use point as the decimal markers. And there are many other countries who use the point. Its time for ISO to change the standard to point. At the same time USA can move to SI. Madan __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/
In China and Taiwan (Taiwan is NOT part of China, see also http://www.taiwannation.com.tw/english.htm , I am a Taiwanese-American, but I no longer consider myself a Chinese), decimal markers are points and separators of triplets are commas, rarely spaces, similar as in the United States and Japan. People there might lack knowledge that reverse practice exists: commas as decimal markers and points as separators of triplets in Continental Europe. Because Chinese and Japanese languages use groups of FOUR rather than THREE in Western countries for numbers, two hundred thousand might be written as 20,0000 for "local use", but it is not very common. A Chinese language site at http://www.cmi.hku.hk/Ref/Article/article07/01.html has the rule on use of numbers; Chinese characters must be used in certain cases. ISO 31 favors commas but still recognizes points as decimal markers used in English; it disallows use of commas and points as separators of triplets, but breach of this "voluntary" standard cause confusions. See also http://www.qsl.net/g1smd/cs129s.htm . Another separator of triplets is ' that I see it in some international documents, e.g., four thousand five hundred as 4'500. ===== Justin JIH http://www.geocities.com/jusjih/ Owner/Moderator - World-Wide Anti-Conscription Unity http://groups.yahoo.com/group/anti-conscription or http://www.egroups.co.uk/group/anti-conscription __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/
