Re: [Gretl-devel] Dot and comma: one more thought

Here's the basic point: every programming language that I'm aware of -- from low-level languages such as Fortran, C, C++ and Java, to interpreted languages such as perl and python, to the scripting languages of statistical software such as R, Stata, Eviews and our hansl -- uses comma as the separator for function arguments (and also as punctuation for other sorts of listings, such as matrix subscripts). This absolutely rules out the use of comma as the decimal separator or "radix point", on pain of fatal ambiguity; the decimal dot is mandatory.