The surprising decimal mark

The weather has been unusual this past week, with temperatures averaging about 10 degrees Celsius above average during the day. As a result, I've been busy doing outdoor things instead of working on this blog. The garden needs extra watering, and I'm worried that the poor little goldfish in my pond will overheat.

I live on the west coast of Canada, on Vancouver Island. Normally, early May is cool and wet, but we've had straight sun for days now, with highs of 27C. Our summer weather is rarely this good, so I'm going to enjoy this while I can.

Now, back to work . . . .

I learned far more than I wanted to when I began researching the proper use of the decimal mark (or decimal point).

Because I'm Canadian, and we pretty much follow British customs, I was taught to use a decimal point to separate the integer part of a number from its fractional part, when the number is written in a decimal form. This decimal mark is called a radix point.

The company owed $198,440.50 in back taxes.

The temperature hit 18.5 degrees yesterday.

But what I didn't know until today is that some countries, in certain instances, use a comma instead of a decimal mark to separate the integer from the fractional.

This can be quite confusing to the traveller, especially when trying to make a purchase in a foreign country.

And what's even trickier,  not only is a comma often used as a radix point instead of a decimal point, the symbols used to separate thousandths (in a large number) might vary. Sometimes a space is used, sometimes an upper comma (what is that?), and sometimes decimal marks do the job. It's all too confusing.

For example, here is the same number as it might be written in different parts of the world.

888,888,888.00 (North America)

888 888 888,00 (Brazil and much of Europe)

888.888.888,00 (Brazil and much of Europe)

888'888'888,00 or 888'888'88.00 (Switzerland)

I remember the first time I went to Venice. I was astounded at the number of jewellery stores, windows piled high with glittering stones. But I found I couldn't decode any of the prices. This was before the Euro, and the Italian Lira was a mystery to me: were those diamonds real or were they zirconia? The price couldn't help me. They cost either $3,000 or $300 US--but I couldn't figure it out.
Too many commas, decimal marks and zeroes on the price tag.

Needless to say, I didn't buy a thing.