On Saturday 17 February 2007 15:43, Michael Payne wrote: > I vote for the comma, it's more easily seen than the dot, (.5 or ,5) There > is a sign in Aspen that says Terminal .2 miles and I was telling someone > one day that it was more like 200 meters then he pointed out it was > actually point 2 miles, I'd missed the point every time I saw the sign for > a couple of years!
That's why a zero should be written before the point. If you miss a dot in "0.5", you see "0 5", which wouldn't be written for 5, so it has to be 0.5. I grew up with both dots and commas for the decimal point (my father came from France, where they use the comma). For numbers in isolation, either convention makes sense to me. But when you have lists of numbers, the only way that looks right is to use dots for the decimal point and commas between the numbers (not at the thousands). phma
