A Regents-qualified text that I used in high school came from Canada
and obviously had this on their mind.  Instead of confusing the
decimal, they used the American decimal mark but no commas, like this:

125 320.9991

The nonbreaking (aligning) space was used as the thousands separator.
This meant that any occurring comma was always linguistic.  I also
found it very easy to read.  In later years, when I was able to
produce this effect on my Macintosh with ease, it was met with
criticism.  So I was badgered into doing it the American-as-apple-pie
way.

Les values 8, 2,3, 0,15, et 3,1.  It does seem weird that they would
have chosen this separator, I never noticed the problem when I was
taking French.  I also think it's strange that the French say, "deux
point trois" for the second number, and then use the comma.  If the
world had ever thought this out, we'd have a different fraction
separator, like a raised dot.

-John

> -----Original Message-----
> From: James Foster [mailto:james at foster.net]
> Sent: Thursday, December 09, 1999 9:06 AM
> To: squeak at cs.uiuc.edu
> Subject: Re: localizing numbers with commas
>
>
> Some years ago I worked on a project to translate a
> healthcare application
> from English to French and we faced some of these issues.
> My favorite story
> is of asking the customer representative (a Ph.D.,
> published researcher, and
> chief of a large teaching hospital) for a delimiter between
> multiple decimal
> numbers.
>
> Q: How would you write the following sentence in a
> scientific article in
> French: "Our lab measured the following values: 2.6, 3, 4.5."?
>
> A: We would not write that sort of article in French.
>
> I got the impression that qualitative work was fine, but
> not quantitative.
> (We offered to use the semicolon in place of the comma and
> translate the
> sentence as "2,6; 3; 4,5" and that was accepted.)
>
> James Foster
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Raab, Andreas" <Andreas.Raab at disney.com>
> [snip]
> In Germany the common separator is "." (e.g., "1.000.000") and the
> delimiter for integer and fraction parts is "," (which
> drives quite some
> people mad if they have to use the 'american way' in common
> programming
> languages).
> [snip]
>
>