Slashdot Mirror
Moving Decimal Bug Loses Money
mario.m7 writes "Poste Italiane, the Italian postal service, suffered yesterday from an abnormal computation in ATM and credit card operations, since the decimal comma was not taken into account. The whole sum was therefore multiplied by 100, resulting in a 115,00 Euro transaction being debited as 11.500 Euro! Thousands of accounts are deep in the red and locked (link pumped through translator), so that no more operations are possible. Poste Italiane is gradually recovering the problem, fixing the error and re-crediting the sum debited in excess. Consumer associations have offered support to clients in case this lasts longer and causes damage."
Do you know the nightmarish hell that is an Excel localized in French while being part of an international team ? Copy-paste of the same data using Excel EN or Excel FR will result in either 115.5 or 115,5 leading to interesting bugs to track...
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
That's a bit naive of you. A better question is: why can't everyone do it the same way? Having a universal standard like this would have many advantages, while having multiple differing formats has only disadvantages.
So a reasonable person is left with the conclusion: doing it the same way everywhere is better. The question naturally follows: which would make a better standard?
The answer to this is: the English way. Why? Because when writing in any language, multiple commas may be used indicating the continuation of the sentence, just as they may be used indicating the continuation of an integer in English number notation. Furthermore, in any language, a period is used to indicate the end of a sentence, similarly to how they are used in English number notation to indicate the end of the integer.
The English way of writing numbers is simply superior, as it is consistent with the way punctuation is used in all languages.
To illustrate my point. I leave you with this bizzare. confusing continental-style punctuation use,
Silly. n'est-ce pas?
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