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Re: How to set ISO date/time with en_US.utf8 as system default?



On Sat, 27 May 2017, at 16:24, gwmfms6@openmailbox.org wrote:

> A lot of Europe does it, and it is wrong! It goes back quite a while to 
> when it was fashionable to use a dot (.) as a symbol for multiplication. 

I don't think it's a straightforward as that.

Mathematics (at university level) uses dot that way, sometimes.  But is
also
uses adjacency of symbols so eg "xy" means x times y, as may "x.y".

> So Europe stopped using a dot to signal a decimal point to avoid 
> confusion (they should have stopped stopped using a dot as a symbol for 
> multiplication). In the U.S. and G.B. an X was used for multiplication 
> symbol so they continued on using a dot for decimal (as it should be).

But mathematics also used dot and x to refer to concepts named
dot-product
and cross-product.  

In other words, what's acceptable/normal depends entirely on the
audience.

-- 
Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.


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