Dot or Comma, Part 2
In a previous post, I wrote about decimal and date notation. I just found a list of which countries use which decimal notation, which I will share here. Additionally, my understanding of thousands separators has increased; I describe that below, also.
Decimal separators
According to Roy S. Freedman in his book “Introduction to Financial Technology”, the following countries use a period as a decimal separator (2.5):
Australia, English-speaking Canada, China, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States.
The following countries use a comma as a decimal separator (2,5):
Andorra, Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, French-speaking Canada, Croatia, Cuba, Chile, Columbia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Estonia, Faroes, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Greenland, hungary, Indonesia, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Netherlands, Norway, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Solvakia, Slovenia, Spain, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, Uruguay, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.
In countries where Arabic digits are used for writing numbers, a character called momayyez (a kind of forward slash) is used as the decimal separator.
As Freedman notes “Mixing up these conventions can wreak havoc with international financial prices.”
Thousands Separators
Thanks to feedback from A.T., I also checked into the use of notation for thousands separators (US: 1,000 or Europe: 1.000). It turns out that the financial world refers to these separators as “pretty print” or as A.T. told me “for presenting information to people with eyes/sight problems, to ease their problems with counting”. For banking and IT purposes, thousands separators just get in the way and are often not used.
Besides the dot and comma as separator, there are a number of countries, including France, Finland, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and French Canada which use spaces for thousands separators, as in 1 234 567,89
Btw, this tiny minority of countries is actually using the International Standard. ISO 31-0 describes the standard decimal and thousands notation as comma and space, or 1 234 567,89
Where else have you seen spaces for thousands separators?
Image from Wiki. Blue - dot, Green - comma, Red - momayyez, Grey - unknown
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