Greebo wrote:Not all European countries use commas for decimals, so it's not just a matter of "US" versus them if you'll forgive my pun-like pedantry!
Yeah, I know, that's why I included this...
redle wrote:(European and US used to match the quoted material, and for simplicity's sake. I realize they are simply general representations)
statement. It was easier to speak of them if they each had a single word to name the format (and comma and period as Names cause their own confusion), even if the name I used is rather inaccurate.
Greebo wrote:What do the users of the decimal comma employ as delineators of "thousands" as a matter of interest, and how does international commerce get around this?
1,000.00
1.000,00
are the two general formats. They reverse the roles of the two delineators.
And I've written software for international companies and dealt with this issue more than once. To some extent the answer to your question is, it depends. Generally speaking, once software has a number and knows it's a number, it doesn't think in terms of "how do I symbolically represent the point at which the number transitions from integer to fraction." The problem comes into play when a number is being read into a system or written out. At these points it transitions from being a number to being a representation of a number. And, frankly, the solution is, tell the software what format is used to represent the number before the transition takes place.
Software can, of course, be written to analyze the number and make an educated guess as to the format. Just like when the scientists working on one of the space missions years ago had something fail because one team was working in English units and one team was working in Metric and someone didn't convert one of the results to the other system before combining them, it's basically a matter of diligence. (Scientific notation is another format in which numbers can be represented. There aren't only the 2 we've been discussing in this instance. You need to know what you have and use it accordingly)