Re: Where to Add new Currency Sign?

From: addison@globalsight.com
Date: Mon Dec 20 1999 - 14:42:31 EST


The currency symbol is often used to show how to format a currency (in
picture strings)--as a placeholder that gets populated at runtime with the
"real symbol(s)".

So the picture string: "¤m,mmm.nn" represents the format that the US uses
($1,500.00) whereas someone in France might choose to use a string like "m
mmm,nn ¤" for "1 500,00 FFr".

The currency symbol is not used, to my knowledge, in any locale to
represent the actual currency. There is always some kind of substitution
made, AFAIK.

Note that there are interesting alternatives out there. For example,
Portugal uses "Ps 1,500$00", last I looked. The "$" symbol is the decimal
separator...

Also, for cross-locale (Enterprise) systems, it is becoming more common to
use the ISO three letter acronym for the currency (so that that same format
can be used in reports) like this:

1,000.00 USD -- US dollar
1,000.00 FFR -- French Franc
1,000.00 DDM -- Deutsch Mark
1,000.00 EUR -- Euro

Of course, you still can't add the column up using simple addition for the
reason Mark cited... ;-)

Regards,

Addison

Addison P. Phillips
Senior Globalization Consultant
Global Sight Corporation

mailto:addison@globalsight.com
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                    Roozbeh Pournader
                    <roozbeh@sina.sha To: "Unicode List" <unicode@unicode.org>
                    rif.ac.ir> cc: Unicode List <unicode@unicode.org>
                                             Subject: Re: Where to Add new Currency Sign?
                    20-12-99 11:13
                                                                                                                       
                                                                                                                       

On Mon, 20 Dec 1999, Mark E. Davis wrote:

> U+00A4 is very dangerous, and must not be used to stand-in for specific
> currencies. Imagine my sending you a document where I list parts at ¤150
each; on
> my machine these appear as dollar-signs, and on yours as italian lire. We
agree
> to buy the parts, but imagine our dismay later on...

Thank you very much for the note. It really helped. I will no stop
recommending it :)

But would you please explain the usage of U+00A4? I really need to now
about that.

--Roozbeh



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