From ALB@immedia.ca Sun Jun 17 14:20:00 1994 Received: from Clouso.CRIM.CA by dkuug.dk with SMTP id AA05462 (5.65c8/IDA-1.4.4j for ); Thu, 16 Jun 1994 21:15:10 +0200 Received: from immedia.ca by clouso.crim.ca (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA12950; Thu, 16 Jun 94 15:14:58 EDT Return-Path: Received: by immedia.ca (3.2/2.D) id AA4409; 16 Jun 94 19:21:05 +1900 Date: 16 Jun 94 19:20:00 +1900 From: ALB@immedia.ca Message-Id: <199406161921.AA4409@immedia.ca> To: bealle@torolab6.vnet.ibm.com, cpwg-mail@revcan.ca, paref@vm1.ulaval.ca, umavs@torolab6.vnet.ibm.com Cc: i18n@dkuug.dk, sc22wg20@dkuug.dk, tc304@dkuug.dk Subject: Decimal delimiter and thousand separators: slight distinction X-Charset: ASCII X-Char-Esc: 29 ---------- Baldur (from Iceland) says, in answer to my posting: >It would certainly be logical to have a special decimal delimiter, and also >perhaps a thousands delimiter, for the Latin/Greek/Cyrillic (and perhaps >other) scripts. This would be congruent with the decimal and thousands >delimiters already implemented in 10646 for Arabic. It is certainly required for presentation and is indeed part of POSIX LOCALEs. However thousand (or any general chunk of digits) delimiters are not absolutely required on input and for massive data entry, it is generally not allowed as it diminishes productivity (well, this is debatable, but it is not absolutely essential). But delimiting the fraction from the integer part of a number is a universal function. The point is that it has no reason to be dependent on the presentation parameters which are part of the LOCALE. It is the way it is done now, though. That is, in my humble opinion, very incorrect for any user interface, and, as I demonstrated, can be counter-productive in multilingual environments. I would agree with Baldur, however, that the end-user has less odds to make mistakes if he/she enters numbers by chunks (of 2, of 3, or whatever). But that does not require a key to be depressed (it is a matter of personal rythm of work and method), unlike the decimal delimiter function which does require it. Alain LaBont