[plug] Calculator that uses commas , for thousands seperation

[Gavin Chester]

On Tue, 2005-07-12 at 23:05 +0800, Richard Meyer wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-07-12 at 20:42 +0800, Gavin Chester wrote:
> > On Tue, 2005-07-12 at 11:19 +0800, Richard Meyer wrote:

-snip much good stuff -

> Under http://www.bipm.fr/en/practical_info/faq/conversions.html
> 
> There is a pointer to a .pdf doc where I found the following
> 

Nice, scholarly expose of the topic.  Thank you for the interesting
reading by virtue of your searching.  I hesitate to say more to avoid
the boring "not how we did it in my day" statements.  However, I
remember being taught to use commas between 1000s and dots at mid-point
in the number when hand-writing, but that all changed to SI unit
convention when digital calculators became available and common (about
mid-70s).  Oops, that's "how we did it in my day".  Oh well.  

Suffice to say, let's hope we don't degenerate into a babel of confusion
as this unfolds.  I mean, it's bad enough the Americans writing their
dates half-backwards (against all other convention) and crashing probes
into Mars because they can't tell the difference between metric
(international) and imperial (American) measurement units! ;-)

Gavin.