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Is there anything wrong with that? If the Kenyan Shilling is as important as they describe in the article, then why should they have to be stuck with a second r
by axman6 13y ago
Is there anything wrong with that? If the Kenyan Shilling is as important as they describe in the article, then why should they have to be stuck with a second rate symbol using latin letters? Do you think the Euro should just use $ or EU$ or something else that doesn't convey the fact that the euro is not called the Euro dollar, but has its own name?
One of the reasons I like using OS X is that, from what I can tell, 99.99% of developers don't have to worry about this stuff. They let the system handle text and font rendering, and when the new Kenyan Shilling symbol is adopted, their apps will render it without having to do any work.
- jpatokal 13y agoAs it happens, $ is originally the peso sign. When is the US going to stop using a secondhand symbol shamelessly stolen from the Mexicans? At the end of the day, you don't need unique symbols to distinguish currencies, because 99.9% of the time you're only dealing with one at a time and, for the remaining 0.01%, there are ISO standard codes that are guaranteed unique. (Unlike "$", mind you.) In Finland, prices at markets were usually written "5,-" in the pre-euro days, and that perfectly clear notation continues to be used after the mark was switched to the euro.
- pavlov 13y agoThe dash in "5,-" simply means that there are no decimals. When you write a price like this which does have decimals, it looks just like a regular number, for example "4,99"... And then you may need something to indicate the unit. The euro sign is a good solution because it resolves the ambiguity of how to write out the currency unit. Here are some ways how the price 0.99 EUR can be written in Finnish: 0,99 euroa 99 senttiä 0,99 EUR 0,99 € Multiply this by 20+ nations and you get a lot of different ways to write a price...! Without the euro symbol, there wouldn't be a single reasonably consistent way to write a price in the Euro zone. Don't forget that there are countries in the Euro zone that use the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets. Just the word "euro" spelled out may be unrecognizable if you don't know the alphabet.
- Robin_Message 13y agoThe European banknotes have the word "EURO" on them three different ways: Romance (EURO), Greek (ΕΥΡΩ), and (since 2013) Cyrillic (ЕВРО). I swear I once saw a picture which was like a Huffman coding table for the spelling of Europe in every European language, but I can't find it now - anyone seen it? It started with a big E, and then had U and Y above on another, and so on.
- Kliment 13y agoIt's on the energy rating cards that appliances have too.
- Robin_Message 13y agoThanks! That's the one, I remember the coloured bars next to it now, and it's the word energy, not Europe. See one at http://blog.calpeda.com/2011/08/calpeda-europump/ http://blog.calpeda.com/2011/08/calpeda-europump/
- GFischer 13y agoIt makes trouble for us that DO use a "peso" as official currency. In our countries, the US dollar is normally written as U$S, U$, or US$.