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Red is my face

From a previous entry:

… the T|E’s Calculator app has an odd bug: the decimal point is displayed as a comma and vice versa e.g. type in “1500” and it’s displayed as “1.500”.

Bug, my ass. I had apparently selected “1.000,00” instead of “1,000.00” in the Formats section of the device preferences and this resulted in that calculator oddity.

But why did palmOne include “1.000,00” as a viable format in the first place? Is it used anywhere?

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2 Responses

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  1. alsotop says

    I think some European countries use this format – I know that France often uses what I would have thought of as decimal points to separate the number, so one million would be: 1.000.000 … or as far I can remember, I’m not sure about them using commas for the points though… strange!

  2. Gobi says

    Apparently, that strange format is a German one. Marty Nemzow writes:

    Not every language or culture formats currencies (and numbers) in the same way. For example 1,000,000.00 in the United States becomes 1.000.000,00 in Germany. Some places will display 1’000’000 and 00/100. In addition, currency symbology is based on prefixes, suffixes and the handling of negative values in different ways. There is no ISO formatting standard and no standard that the international banking community accepts. The differences create functional problems for banks unfamiliar with specific currencies and cultural idioms. I once saw a U.S. bank overpay (by a hundred dollars) on a wire to a Japanese manufacturer because the yen was in such big numbers (and lacked decimal places) when contrasted to the USD amounts. The banker misplaced a decimal thinking he was fixing an erroneous-exitant error.