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

In one of my postings on this topic I mentioned that the majority of the world's population uses the decimal dot, not the comma. That's true (since it's what the Chinese and the Indians do) but it was not very clever considered as a rhetorical ploy since it's strictly irrelevant to the matter at issue. Suppose the Chinese were to switch to the decimal comma. That would, I suppose, be enough to flip the world majority, but it would make no difference to our question. 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. One may wish that things were otherwise, but this is just a brute historical fact over which none of us has any control. Anyone who aspires to computer literacy, regardless of the country in which they live, has to come to terms with this fact. In GUI entry boxes where plain numbers are wanted it's easy enough to take ',' on input from the user and convert to '.' for internal use, but when numbers appear in a context that involves functions and other relatively complex syntactical constructs such translation is not practicable. And neither is it practicable in scripts. Allin