Why some countries have dot as a decimal separator and some have comma?

Question

Why in some countries there is a comma separator and in some dot? Do you know what is the reason of that? It's very annoying to check every time if you should use this or this.

Answer 1

That's the way culture happens. Seriously, compared with other cultural issues (time zones, chronologies, left-to-right vs right-to-left and date formats spring to mind) this is a relatively easy one...

Life would certainly be easier if we'd built our world around what would make a developer's life sane:

• One time system without the insanity (too many issues to mention)
• One currency
• One way of writing numbers, dates etc
• One system of measurement
• One relatively small character set (fitting in a single byte would be handy)
• One mode of writing
• One language

On the other hand, I think we'd miss a great deal of the richness of life that way...

Answer 2

I would suggest reading the Wikipedia entry on the history of the decimal separator. Basically, it boils down to different choices made when typesetting what was previously written by hand.

Answer 3

For the same reason we have different languages, date formats, and that the US refuses to use the metric system, I'm afraid.

I live in Sweden, were the default separator for some reason is comma - and I think that is so utterly utterly stupid. :-( On the other hand, we use the date format yyyy-mm-dd, which is the logical way to represent dates since it is positional and therefore will string-compare directly when sorting! :-)

Answer 4

So don't. System.Globalization is your friend, use the NumberDecimalSeparator property. It's just another aspect of internationalisation, same as translating strings or anything else.