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Comment by mahaganapati | Hacker News Reader

Nitpick: the dollar symbol comes BEFORE the number. $49 and not 49$

Are there currencies that write it at the end instead?

Yes, we write 49€. It's how you spell it, fourty nine euro. Actually, it depends where, but most of the country put the sign at the end, like most notations.

Although in juxtaposition from the English pronunciation, it has an advantage:

"If it was written as 1,200.00$ it would be easier to forge it to become, for example, 91,200.00$ by appending a single digit in front."

It is the same if it goes before.

$100 can become $1000 or whatever. It is in fact this the reason checks have the quantity written in letters too, and also a dash that occupies the rest of the space.

It’s not the same if you complete the amount with cents. 100.00$ can become 9100.00$ much easier than $100.00.

I explicitly and carefully write out my tip and total with a dollar sign and cents and sometimes circle the total in an attempt to prevent the temptation for anyone to alter the amount (I’ve heard this happening to a could of friends back in college at restaurants and bars).

It isn't really about currencies, it's about languages: pretty much every language other than English uses "49 €" form. So I guess, writing all currency signs before the number is pretty commonplace now, but that's probably because americans are notoriously, well, american-centric.

Hum... pretty sure that the Europeans are the exception in those. Majority of American and Asian countries use the currency symbol before the amount, Africans are split.

50:- or 50 kr is how 50 kronor is written in sweden (and probably all of scandinavia).

Oh, I didn't know that. Thank you!

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