Tables

[Damian Cugley]

On 12/7/05, David Herren <david at idiomatrix.com> wrote:

> Virtually everywhere in the world other than the US uses a comma to

> indicate decimal fractions, correct? Certainly in Spain, Italy,

> France, etc. I've only been in the UK once and didn't happen to

> notice while there.


When I was growing up in Australia I was taught that, in contrast with
the USA, the decimal point was a middle dot U+00B7, as in 3·14159 or
£5·36. I believe this was standard in the non-American
English-speaking world. It had the excellent property of being
different from the characters used for sentence punctuation.

The lack of a code point for this symbol in ASCII and its omission
from typewriter and computer keyboards has meant that this convention
has fallen in to disuse in favour of the American convention, in much
the same way as people have become used to typewriter-style quotation
marks and cannot distinguish hyphens from dashes. A few publications
still use the British decimal point, but they are the exception rather
than the rule.

None of which is really germaine to Markdown, of course... :-)

-- Damian

--
Damian Cugley, Alleged Literature
http://www.alleged.org.uk/pdc/