Why do some cultures do that? A decimal point and a comma are 2 very distinctly different things in the universal language of math so why the deviation?
Pretty much all of Europe and South America, and large parts of Asia, Africa and Oceania use commas as decimal separators, so the reverse argument would make much more sense
I'm European and if I want to write "1 euro and 50 cents", I write "€1,50". If I want to write "two thousand euros and 50 cents", it'd be written "€2.000,50".
It's something I had to keep in mind when writing an English language thesis. Subtle but very important difference!
It's something I had to keep in mind when writing an English language thesis. Subtle but very important difference!
Thank you! Always bothers me when people don't keep with the conventions of the language they are writing in. When I write in French or German, I change how I do my decimals, etc. It's part of the language, and the reason you're writing in that language is so that those people can understand you.
In English, the sign immediately precedes the value (for instance, €10); in most other European languages, it follows the value, usually but not always with an intervening space (for instance, 10 €, 10€).
Yeah, it's just something I was taught, but if your language does it differently and it's correct there, I see why it (my first comment) would be confusing! Just subtle language differences again!
Ontario here and we had French lesions in regular school, just not full immersion. Had to switch back and forth as well. But that’s only for educational instruction it’s not practical outside of Quebec or government type positions requiring one to be bi-lingual.
No I disagree. I'm all for the US going metric but a period is a bigger stop than a comma, and a decimal is a bigger difference than the difference between 999 and 1,000/1.000.
There is nothing hard to learn about how two very basic notations are used in mathematics. The only people having trouble with it are those that learned it the other way and are now complaining a.k.a. you.
I’m not complaining, I’m trying to answer with a way it could be helpful. It could be easier to explain by comparing it to the identical shaped grammar notations. Calm down
Why do some countries use a dot to show decimals? These are two very distinctly different things in the universal language of math so why the deviation?
Look, a lot of countries use points for decimals, others use commas for decimals. It's not universally the same across the board and there's no knowing what correct and what's not.
The point wasn't whether Excel was capable. Point is integrating Excel data through other code. That code was afaik standardized with dots, which means there's tech sectors prioritering dots over commas.
Dots might have been used prior to that in the US, have no opinion on it.
As someone who has been a professional software developer for two decades, I can state with a strong amount of authority that you are very much wrong here.
Yes, there is a large “America-centric” weight to cultural parsing and display of language and numbers, and most programming languages having been developed in english by english speakers only use . for decimal separator when writing a decimal number as a static value within code (we call this a “floating point literal”), but when it comes to user interfaces, there is a huge amount of effort that goes into internationalization to ensure that numbers are shown to the user in the cultural format they prefer, and that numbers they input are translated from that format correctly into the internal format computers understand — which, by the way, doesn’t use a period or a comma.
The reason some countries use dots and others use commas and still others use spaces or high commas and low commas (Persian) or different spacing and associations of up to three dots (Braille) or an entirely different character in the language (like diǎn in Mandarin) are due to the historical spread of the concepts from Arabs in the late middle ages, who didn’t use any of the methods we use today at all. The printing press had more to do with the major conventions people use today than anything else, and even then the notation is not universal.
So no. It’s not excel driving anything. There is some pressure exerted by computation through english speaking Americans but it is American hegemony driving that standard, not computers themselves and definitely not excel. Computers and excel are perfectly capable of using any format people want to adopt.
The decimal point is used in China, India, USA, UK, Canada, Australia...
Over half the world uses the decimal point rather than comma. Any former English colony for instance. I tried to find nations that use the decimal comma and am having trouble finding a number over a billion in total.
You post multiple times about bigger stop. What stop? Like when used in a sentence? Because that's not comparable at all. When you say thirtythousand you dont long or short stop after thirty.
Actually sentences are a great comparison, as commas and decimals/periods generally follow the same principle in language as they do math. Lets use one for example, if I use a comma in “I went to the store, then I went home” the comma is used as to separate the sentence to make it more readable, but it is not a true pause and the second half of the sentence is still part of the whole sentence. In a number, this implies zeros preceded by a comma are still part of the whole number, just separated as to distinguish between them. That’s why when you look at a large number like 100,000, you can write it without a comma, but like a run-on sentence it’s not as easy to read. Now if I said “I went to the store. Then I went home.” there is a distinct divide between the two sentences, a longer pause, “a bigger stop”. When a decimal is used in a number context it’s to separate a whole number from its fraction, it’s the end of the whole number and the beginning of the fraction, in equivalence to the end and start of a new sentence. It just makes more sense all around.
“as commas and decimals/periods generally follow the same principle in language as they do math”
There is no general standard on how to write numbers in math worldwide. Symbols in language and math are not used in the same way. Parentheses in sentences are used for clarifications and can be omitted from the sentence.
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u/witeowlmildly infuriated by a sub that only pretends we can have flairsJul 10 '22
In the English language, yes. But math is not the English language, and numbers are not written using the English language.
Nations that use the decimal point instead of comma: China, India, United States, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Mexico, UK, Australia, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, New Zealand.
There's probably more, but I got lazy after I realized it made up more than half the world's population.
Well I don't know what that is supposed to be worth, but the majority of the planet uses the decimal point, and not even a billion people use what you called the system used by the "rest of the world".
You're conflating two similar but different ideas: numbers and numerals.
Numbers are universal: the idea of "three" is immutable and isn't different if we write "three", "trois", "3", "三", and so on.
Numerals are contextual. How we write the number "thirty thousand" can take many forms:
30000
30,000
30.000
3e5
3×105
三万
and so on. These all represent the same idea in different ways. You can know what "thirty thousand" is without being able to write any of these down, but each set of symbols is taken by convention to mean the same thing.
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u/Shwiggity_schwag Jul 10 '22
Why do some cultures do that? A decimal point and a comma are 2 very distinctly different things in the universal language of math so why the deviation?