R help - Mar 2003 - numbers and decimal points

I have a question for our European readers:  how common is it to use
commas as decimal points in spread-sheet and statistics applications?

Is it an inconvenience to require that all data use a period as decimal point?
(i.e., 3.14159 rather than 3,14159).

We're trying to make our program as foolproof as possible, and would
prefer not to give users a chance to have commas as both decimal points
and field delimiters.

Thanks,

Janet Rosenbaum					  jerosenb at fas.harvard.edu
Center for Basic Research in the Social Sciences, Harvard University

On Fri, 14 Mar 2003, janet rosenbaum wrote:
> I have a question for our European readers:  how common is it to use
> commas as decimal points in spread-sheet and statistics applications?
> 
> Is it an inconvenience to require that all data use a period as decimal
point?
> (i.e., 3.14159 rather than 3,14159).
Depends where you are in Europe ... it is extremely uncommon to the far
west of Europe.  Note that R itself does not allow this, so presumably
people using R do not find it an inconvenience and you will have seriously
skewed your sampling frame by asking on R-help if your program is not R
itself.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

Dear Janet,

In Spain, it is common for spreadsheets to use commas for the decimal point. 
As well, (the spanish version of) some statistical software allows either 
comma or period. 

However, most people I know of have no problem at all using the period (and 
many of them do change the defaults in their OS and/or spreadhseet, to use 
the period instead of the comma, precisely to avoid the confussion you 
mention).

Best,

Ram?n





On Friday 14 March 2003 16:12, janet rosenbaum wrote:
> I have a question for our European readers:  how common is it to use
> commas as decimal points in spread-sheet and statistics applications?
>
> Is it an inconvenience to require that all data use a period as decimal
> point? (i.e., 3.14159 rather than 3,14159).
>
> We're trying to make our program as foolproof as possible, and would
> prefer not to give users a chance to have commas as both decimal points
> and field delimiters.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Janet Rosenbaum					  jerosenb at fas.harvard.edu
> Center for Basic Research in the Social Sciences, Harvard University
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
> https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
-- 
Ram?n D?az-Uriarte
Bioinformatics Unit
Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncol?gicas (CNIO)
(Spanish National Cancer Center)
Melchor Fern?ndez Almagro, 3
28029 Madrid (Spain)
http://bioinfo.cnio.es/~rdiaz