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>On the other hand, the Germans seem to use commas as decimal marks, which is even sillier. Yes, it's a bit silly that there are multiple decimal marks used, b

• btschaegg 10y ago
  From a traditional (handwriting/typewriter) perspective, every symbol is just as valid as any other, of course. What I find to be a particularly bad decision is still using the comma in the "modern" context of computers. It's basically just doing things different for the difference's sake. The UK/US influence wrt. the notation of numbers in the computer age has been huge for historical reasons, with the effect that e.g. I know of no single programming language that uses a comma for this purpose. Clinging to the comma (for spreadsheets for example) adds no substantial benefit, but generates much confusion if you find yourself in an unexpected regional setting and your numpad starts to produce commas or your excel sheet stops returning sensible numbers. So, at least from my naive perspective, using comma and dots as two different digit separators is a bit silly because of their visual similarity, while continuing to use the comma for specific regions while the world of computing basically has (de facto-)standardized on other formats is sillyness that is actively maintained. One could essentially call it "notational cruft". It reminds me of the US not adopting the metric system - but at least, I can see a high mental barrier there (if you "think" in °F, °C will always be weird). Edit: Of course, no such post would be complete without to the NASA Mars Climate Orbiter [1], where exactly this effect (physics calculations are usually done in SI units) had caused rather costly practical issues. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter