Subject: Characters for decimal delimiter

From: [email-masked]
Date: 22 Jun 94 15:12:00 -0500

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People got confused with the proposal of a new character for the decimal
delimiter.  The intent was to be able to use a character (or characters) in
documentation to mean the function decimal delimiter.  In a private note to
Otto, Jean-Yves insists to have this character as the code transmitted to the
application.  This was never my intent.  Anyway it would be very controversial
and IBM (and others) would indeed have problems with it (I understand why,
and I fully agree).  When ambiguity in exchanges of data is to occur because of
this being expressed in character form in files, the best thing to do is
exchange numbers in binary form.  If you still want to exchange numerical data
over, say, the Internet in 7-bit email, anyway you'll have to describe any
field, with its conventions, and perhaps provide a private converter.  For
normal files, ODA/ODIF could also be used.  I'm not an expert in this field but
this standard should be able to tell what is the content of a field.

Now Jean-Yves Fortin (Canadian government) suggested in his note to Otto to use
".," instead of "./," of which I had already changed the order to ",/." I don't
want people to think I made a change because I've a spirit of contradiction, but
I changed Jean-Yves suggestion to ",." because when you pronounce ".," in French
you will say "POINT VIRGULE" which could be confused with "POINT-VIRGULE", the
French name of the SEMICOLON character.  VIRGULE POINT (COMMA DOT) has less odds
to be mistaken for something else.  The Canadian contribution now proposes ",."
and does not discuss how would work that function.  But I have included the
numerous contributions (private and public) in annex of the contribution,
including Jean-Yves juggling with group shifting and partial line ups and downs
(in answer to Otto's exponentiation function), Otto's very interesting juggling
with Ctrls, exponent functions and so on... A lot of reading for experts, only
for their information though.  They will be very interested, in particular the
Germans.  I'm very satisfied of the discussion personally which was very
creative in a very short period of time.  Hosanna in the highest skies of the
Internet! (-:

Alain