North America uses "." So it's not almost every country.

he said a LOT, not almost every one. besides, north america has about 5 or 10 counries(USA, Canada, and Mexico being the biggest)

edit: spelling

The comma is the international standard (ISO 31).

(Myself I refuse to conform to it in Norwegian, as we generally use comma-delimited lists of numbers. So a list starting at 1 with 1/10 increments would have to look like {1, 1,1, 1,2, 1,3, ...}. Inconvenient. And semicolon-delimited lists are ugly.)

Well, if out of 200 countries only three use "." it is true almost every country uses ",". *

*) just made up figures to state my point and the meaning of "almost". The real situation is a little bit more complex.

That's exactly what I meant. Thanks Maurits.

Since China and India both use the . as a decimal seperator I think it's fair to say the number of people using one or the other is not as obviously biased towards one or the other...

You can't say for sure that a whole “country” is using comma. There are other software, mostly databases and spreadsheets designed to work with the default kbd layout, where dot is assigned to Gray(.).

I live in LV. Yet I refuse to accept this ISO 31 because:
- The "." was a de facto standard in computers before anybody paid attention to languages and locales.
- Choice of decimal separator doesn't matter much in handwritten text.
- Keyboard layout with Gray(.) remapped to comma decreases typing speed of IP addresses.
- Nobody can expect United States, UK, China and India to switch the separator.
- Choice between dot and comma shouln't be part of any language.

Today FLAC approves my choice to be right.

My country's standard decimal point is the comma, but we're so used to US punctuation (and calculators) that when dealing with electronic equipment, we used "." as the decimal point.

However, the national standard is "," and all scientific documents and/or official documents must use "," for decimal point.

So I personally went the French way to prevent confusion between using "," as a decimal point or thousands separator.

South Korea uses the decimal point, and uses the comma to separate places in groups of three digits.

123,456,789.0123

However, counting in the Korean language is done in groups of four digits, so 123,456,789.0123 is read like "1 eok 2345 man 6789 jeom 0 1 2 3." It'd be much simpler if we used 1,2345,6789.0123, but we don't.

@kjoonlee: You should read how the Indians split their numbers on wikipedia!

Also according to wikipedia, the Chinese actually group numbers by the 4's.

In the aerospace industry in the UK we generally use a . to denote inches and a , to denote millimetres as the decimal seperator.

This seems like a text problem (tukey(0,5) is being interpreted at tukey(0.5) in some cases). Why not specify the command-line option like this: tukey(0, 5)

Over here we use the form 1,234,567.89

It just looks wrong to see 0,5 to express 1/2, but that's just me.

Yeah it's pretty amazing. The [[Kajol]] article says "1 [[crore]] (10 million) rupees" instead of "10 million rupees!"

Korea and Japan use the Chinese system too for large numbers, BTW.