Comment by darklajid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by darklajid | Hacker News Reader

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. would be a weird here as well (and we had a share of issues with early online banking systems: Think "I want to pay 10 $currency, let's put 10.00 - and the bank uses the . as a delimiter for thousands, i.e. 1.000,00 / you meant 10,00).

That said, my favorite localization issues stem from CH/Switzerland. Numbers are formatted as 1'000.00 there (someone correct me), which is especially odd:

1) That's a weird decimal separator. DE uses a , and as far as I know FR uses a , as well. I _assume_ IT uses a , - so why is this a . in CH?

2) The ' really kills a lot of naive parsers and causes quite a bit of frustration in other fields (think OCR - some overly fat 1'000 might turn into a 11000 with bad luck/crappy image quality or (marginally better) lead to 1000 where means 'I think here's a character, but no clue what that might be')

1) This is actually not that clear cut. Both , and . are used and it depends on context which is used where (usually within the same business sector the guidelines are consistent).

2) Actually, I find it much more confusing that people are constantly using . and , for two completely different functions and not get confused about it. Mistaking a . for a , and vice-versa is quite easy.

And that not even considers the likely confusion for people coming from countries with different rules.

OTOH an ' is highly distinct visually from both a , and . so it's always clear that it can't be the decimal separator.

Different currency has different conventions?

I'm confused.

Yes, different conventions exist (in this case the thread drifted to bugs based on locales, so obviously we're talking about different conventions here). I .. don't understand what you're saying.

(and my original post is missing an asterisk in two places, as in 1?000 as OCR result for example - messed up the formatting in the middle of the night)

Sorry - my point was counter to your about DE, FR and IT having the same conventions, so it's odd CH doesn't too. They all use the same currency, whereas CH doesn't, hence why there'd be a different one (?). E.g. we use £1,000.00 in the UK.

DE, FR and IT have the same currency only the last 15 years or so. One would expect that they would be using the same conventions because of the history and relationships between CH and all of these countries.

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