From: Jukka K. Korpela (jkorpela@cs.tut.fi)
Date: Wed Sep 14 2005 - 03:56:43 CDT
On Wed, 14 Sep 2005, Antoine Leca wrote:
> On Tuesday, September 13th, 2005 14:07Z Elliotte Harold wrote:
>> Does anyone happen to know of a locale where these two
>> values are different?
>
> Here in Spain, sometimes a quote ' is used as separator.
I wonder if that means the ASCII apostrophe, or the right single quotation
mark, or something else. Using anything like that as a monetary
decimal separator is interesting, since it conflicts with the convention
(applied elsewhere for numbers > 999 in general) of using such a character
as thousands separator. It's a confusion comparable to the two uses of
"." and "," in numbers.
> The normal
> ("official") is the comma, so it is definitively "colloquial" use
I think it is rather common to use _some_ character different from the
normal decimal separator as a monetary decimal separator, in "colloquial"
use (informal language), and previously in formal language too. When I was
young, it was not uncommon to see monetary amounts in the style "2:45"
but numbers in general in the style "2,45". I guess such practices have
become less common, as the euro has been introduced. I don't think I've
often seen "2:45 euros" or anything like that.
I was somewhat surprised at seeing an _official_ practice of using a
monetary decimal separator different from decimal separator described and
recommended in a rather new document: The Swedish recommendations to
public administration, or "Myndigheternas skrivregler", issued in November
2004, recommend the use of ":" as a decimal separator (though they
mention, in parentheses, the use of "," as well). They can be found via
the intro page http://www.regeringen.se/sb/d/253/a/33329
and rules are in clause 9.5 Penningbelopp, at
http://www.regeringen.se/content/1/c6/03/33/29/b0cc0c31.pdf#page=65
(The rule is formulated in terms of the crown, "krona", and its
hundredths, "ören", but there is nothing there that says that other
currencies should be presented differently.)
-- Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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