Respect to the (inter)national standards is reflection of one culture

Decimal mark is defined as a symbol used to separate the integer part from the fractional part of a decimal number. Also, it affects the symbol for the thousands separator used for digit grouping. Unfortunately, there are two symbols that are used for decimal mark most often - comma and point, and it causes much inconvenience in the decimal numbers notation.

Almost all countries in Europe use comma as decimal separator, excluding United Kingdom, Switzerland and Luxembourg which uses both marks officially. Comma is decimal mark standard for international blueprints by ISO (International Organization for Standardization). But, on the other side, United States use decimal point, and the problems arise... even more, People's Republic of China uses decimal point, and more problems arise!

Comma is the official decimal mark in Republic of Macedonia. Nevertheless, the bad practice of using the point as a decimal mark is critical. Decimal point is used in almost all electronic systems, just because it is easier for the programmers to code using the default US database collation and numbers comparison and default and only one program languagesnumbers comparison, which are US products most often. The hardware is produced in China in almost all cases.

Furthermore, the tragedy continues in the way that disobeying the official notation is ignored by the public institutions, banks and similar country core institutions. Their systems use point decimal mark. A quiz question for the banking professionals - why does SWIFT use decimal comma?

On a electronic system with wrong regional settings, when multiplying two numbers with official notation and three decimal places each, you could come to a result that is multiplied by mistake with 1 (one) million... and 1 wrong million multiplication is a big problem!

Then, lets imagine a strange situation - whole his life a student learns that comma is a decimal separator. All of a sudden he receives notification that he has 187,345 Euros on his account. He would not know whether he really received 187 Euros or he received 187 thousand Euros and start wondering whether he is subject to a phishing attack. Quite a little difference, ha.

What if we start to mix the date format, also, and we see the date 03/06/2014 - is it third of June or sixth of March?

We should use the national standards and stop wondering - the matters should be done in the right way, even if it is the harder way.

This is an appeal to the programmers to try to respect the standards of their mother country and all relevant authorities to regulate the decimal mark issue – it’s a reflection of country’s culture and cause of serious inconvenience and errors.