How commas broke the Pokémon calculator but fixed an exchange rate. 

Commas can dramatically change the meaning of a sentence: "I like to eat fruit." becomes "I like to eat commas." Very different meaning.

This is the closest we've been to another episode of calculator unboxing/review

Dont worry Matt, we all know this video just now came out because it took a year for your Python code to finish running 🤣

Here's a little fact. Braille gets around the dot/comma issue for decimal separators by simply using a third symbol that's (usually) different from the others (same for the thousands separator if it's used). There's also the fact that strings of numbers in braille are first marked by a special universal symbol (Unless you're from France, which uses a different symbol and characters for numbers. French Canadian braille *does* use the universal numbering system which is extra fun to deal with.) This symbol essentially 'switches modes', meaning that after it, each symbol you read should be interpreted as a number until you're told to return back to text (This can be implicitly indicated by a space). This means that while our Western Arabic numerals are pretty standard across the planet, braille has even greater universality. Unless you're from France. Or Luxembourg.

A similar thing happened to me when I went to Kyrgyzstan. The exchange rate between the Euro and the kyrgyz Som happened to be 1 to 100. The kyrgyz Som’s abbreviation is a capital S. But, because Cyrillic is used in Kyrgyzstan the S is written as a C, that’s also the abbreviation of the Euro cent, sometimes. So for me, every price tag in Kyrgyzstan was written in Euro cents and no conversion was needed.

In Sweden it is convention to use the comma as a decimal, and this is extremely annoying whenever we do online tests of any kind, because we always have to keep in mind that those online tests read commas as decimals, which is completely different from how our university course books - which tend to mostly be in English - do it.

The humble,

When I was in Japan it was pretty close to 100 JPY to 1 USD, so I just treated the yen as US cents. It was very convenient and illustrated to me that you don't really gain anything by having two tiers of currency.

As a maths and physics teacher, the decimal dot/comma thing is a source of great befuddlement to my students. In Germany, we use the comma as the decimal separator, but the GeoGebra app we use as a calculator these days has the English decimal dot. Not only that, but there's a comma right there in the interface to separate coordinates! Only you end up with imaginary numbers if you use it for maths.

The last scenario, where the number jumps around when typing in a comma -- they attempted to type 2.3654 and the numbers as displayed were 2, 3.3, 6.36, 5.365, 4.3654. You'll notice that for each of these, the whole number matches the last decimal entered. It's assigning the user input as a new decimal value, AND as the whole number value. It would make sense that this could somehow be again related to the comma separator, maybe the way the program reads the user input searches for a decimal specifically and when there is no period (because it's a comma) there's some kind of overlap in the function for assigning new decimal digits as well as the leading whole number digit. Conjecture town, population plus one.

I think why this and the Casio rational pi one you did a while back are so compelling is that it hurts to see a friend who is broken and throwing up question marks. We need to figure out what is wrong.

Oooh... I was born in Russia where comma is used as decimal separator and then moved to Canada where dot is used... it was confusing at first indeed... The most annoying thing about it is Excel really, as depending on which language I choose it swaps about separators too...

Im faintly disappointed that we got through an entire video about commas casuing computer errors and there wasnt a single mention of a CSV file.

Back when I was stationed in Japan, the exchange rate was pretty close to 1 penny to 1 yen, which made price conversions fairly trivial.

A few years ago, 1 GBP cost 100 RUB. I was in a store that used price tags in pence. Therefore, I did not need to convert not only numbers, but also units of measurement. Since 1p = 1р, where the first 'p' is a Latin letter, and the second 'р' is a Cyrillic letter.

Fun fact: The Latin American localized version of Excel separates decimals using commas and thousands using points. Now, it does one more change. It separates CSV files using semicolons.

Thanks for letting everyone know I was playing Pokémon in my 30's Matt...

I'm from Peru and it was so funny hearing Matt pronounce "huevo sol" which would mean sun eggs hahaha it's actually "nuevo sol" which is new sun, I like the name of our currency :) like I'm buying things in exchange for stars.

The difference between the questionmark vs predator vision is super interesting. The questionmarks make total sense. It's most likely a try-catch that returns a questionmark string in case of an exception. But the no change at all indicates that an uncaught exception happened that just terminated the processing of the calculation. This is very common behavior in many game engines because you don't want your game to crash from some random exception you can not immediately do anything about in the released product anyway and which might not be important. So the code simply never reached the part that updates the text label of the calculator. So I would conclude the exception is happening in different places in the two cases or there are simply different versions of that code, one with a try catch and one without. Post-release update cycles of games sometimes happen in diverging forks of the core product for each region so it might depend on the distribution server region you downloaded the game/latest game update from.

In the old Roller Coaster Tycoon games, you could select your currency of choice in the game in the preferences, and it mostly worked without really changing the prices. The trick? Every exchange rate was a power of 10. Which means any currency on the order of magnitude to the dollar/pound/euro will convert to the South Korean Won at a rate of exactly 1000 to 1.

My guess is that the original code would take a float and directly draw it to the calculator. Then localization was added which converted the float into a string, localized the string, and then converted the result back into a float. The conversion may have originally introduced a bug, which was later resolved without checking other regions. Or they may have been using a programming language which does this automatically so no one noticed. But I'm betting that localization being added after the calculator was programmed is what broke it.

When you multiply/add a number on the pokémon calculator and it reaches more digits than the calculator has normally it shows those question marks. Like you said it may fetch the amount of characters that needs first and if that amount exceeds the maximum limit displays question marks, which would then make sense for the repeating decimals since it would fetch more leading zeros than the maximum amount in the same way it would for multiplication/addition.

Matt: "The humble comma, full stop" Me: those are two different things

I didn’t know about the BDSP calculator bug, but this is very fitting considering how blisteringly hot the conversation about how janky and broken Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are on release. Fun fact about BDSP, one of the people who got it early managed to flip between the two versions via their hacked Nintendo Switch. They are literally the EXACT same game, just with a little flag in the software which forces it to be the version you bought.

Combining this video with Tom's on crazy Pokédex facts, maybe we can come to the conclusion that some of the Pokédex's crazy numbers (like Magcargo's temperature or Wailord's weight) are a result of Professor Oak using the BDSP calculator to come up with them?

I'm from the USA and when I was traveling to South Korea, $1 was pretty much 1000 Won. And for a long time $1 was about the same as ¥100 in Japan so it was easy to think about ¥1 being a penny.

The Pokemon conversion bug happened to me, but in a very different situation. I bought a brand new Vauxhall (Opel) Astra in 2004 - it was the then-new shape. I'm British so it was right-hand drive. It had heated front seats but I quickly found that the left switch operated the right seat and vice versa. The best answer the garage, along with investigations by Vauxhall UK, could come up with was that the CAN bus messages were getting translated so that in some places they were positional: "turn on the left seat" but in others that had become logical "turn on the driver's seat" (which was the passenger seat as my car was RH drive). The only way it could be fixed was for the entire seat wiring to be pulled out and refitted. It turned out that too many modules needed to be changed / reprogrammed to make it economical compared to the 2 days it took the car to be rewired. I presume they fixed the bug(s) eventually!

I love the way Matt humanizes the computer when it doesn't update the screen. I will always picture Matt's face when my program doesn't update the screen because it doesn't know the answer.

Just checked my original diamond version (for the Nintendo DS, which despite the fact that it wasn't turned on for years, worked perfectly fine without charging...) The problem does not occur, neither when I set the language to germany, nor english. The game is in german and uses the dot as a decimal separate (despite the fact that germany uses commas).

Fun fact: In a localized version of Excel where comma is used as the decimal separator the argument separator for formulas changes from comma to semicolon. So you get formulas like this: =if(A1=3,14; "Something"; "Something else")

What a coincidence. Started playing Shining Pearl just today and now Matt Parker is making a video about it 😳 checked the calculator and I'm from Finland where the decimal "point" is a comma and it seems to have been fixed.

I ran into something similar to this when comparing gasoline prices, where the exchange rate was very close to the ratio of gallons:liters, so prices on the sign in each country were very comparable - US$/gallon vs local currency/liter.

Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl are not _re-releases_ (as stated 7:56), they are _remakes_ of the games from the Nintendo DS, meaning they are entirely new products.

I remember this being a massive problem for the freeware game Aurora and getting well documented there. It was a spreadsheet heavy game written in visualbasic and exel. It couldn't run if your windows language was set to a comma language.

They may have not made the best calculator, but at least it finishes it's calculations in mess than a month

13:57 "Don't play the game" Best advice Matt has ever given

Probably could have remained a main channel video, despite being uploaded later than intended. In any case, I'm pretty sure you're basically right about what the calculator is doing - it's probably implemented a bit differently but ultimately equivalent to what you described.

I have a theory about the two first weird cases. I agree that there's a stage for getting the length of the number it needs to show and a separate stage for it to actually display the number. In the first case, e.g. the 10/4=002 it gets correctly that the length is 3 and so fills the screen with 3 zeros. Next stage is getting the number, where it gets just the 2 (probably throwing an error because it expects a comma and got a point or something like that). Nevertheless it only gets the 2, so it writes that over the last 0. We get 002. The problem with the repeating numbers might be explained in that it throws an error in the first of the two stages: finding the length of the number. The method for finding the length is not as simple as just as that, we need to show all the digits of the whole part of the number, and as many of the decimal as possible. The problem may arise in that it can't separate the decimal from the whole, so it looks like an incredibly long whole number and it just refuses to print that out on the console (which is probably the intended behaviour for when the answer is in fact a very long whole number). Probably the approach for finding the length of the number (which is the obvious approach and would produce these results is): -Split the number based on where the "." falls. -Count the length of the first part (the whole part). -If that part is longer than 10 throw an error (an error at this stage shows ???????) -If there is not part after the "." return the number of characters -If there is a second part return either: "whole number digit count" + 1 (for ".") + "decimal part digit count" or 10, whichever is smallest. This would work correctly for when the decimal separator is "." but if it is a comma we'd get an error on the second step.

There's more than the “swap comma and point” arrangement. I don't know if comma is competitive to the point as the decimal separator, but another common “thousands separator” is the space. And it's not always regular _thousands_ all the way through as the base. To establish an equivalence with the common notion of the integer base notation here, think of the integer part's “thousand separation” as a recurrent application of rem 1000 and div 1000. Every triplet is essentially a base-1000 digit, written as its decimal value (up to rules w.r.t leading zeroes in the leftmost vs. other digits). In the UK, the radix is pure, always 10³. But there are mixed radix notations, and in quite no obscure places! While India uses the comma for decimals and the point for grouping of the whole part, the same way the UK does, open any Indian newspaper, find an article mentioning a large number, commonly a sum of money, and you're up to a surprise. No, it's no a typo. :) It's equivalent, in the above sense, to a {10², 10³} mixed-base integer notation.

As a fan from Santiago, I'm really glad that you got a nice story from here.

I love how you posted this a few days ago, saying 'a new pokemon game had released' which is true, because Scarlet and Violet had released just last weekend, but you were talking about a game that is now a year old instead and I had to double-take it :p

a steam game of mine was broken for everyone in europe and such because I did a janky number-string-number conversion for truncation lol

Commas can save your family. "We're going to eat, Grandpa." or "We're going to eat Grandpa."

A little like the Douglas adams calculator in Dirk Gently, that rendered any number greater than 4 as a 'Suffusion of yellow'.

This video appeared on my home screen, so congrats on the algorithm. It was rambly as you said towards the end, but your video is well-thought-out regardless, and plenty entertaining. I'm now going to, for the very first time, check out the rest of your content and likely subscribe. Great stuff!

You should’ve named this channel Matt Parker 3 and made everyone try really hard to find Matt Parker 2

Based on assumption: It's string size allocation. Say you want to display a string from a number: You create a string of the size of the number of digits (dot included), and then you run it through a hex converter against valid hex codes for each number to character values. the number 2 and the character 2 in the character sheet table don't share the same value at all. In order to prevent weird characters in the display, only a few are allowed, namely number 0 to 9, the dot and the question mark for errors. So if I want to turn 2.5 into a string, I first create a string of 3 characters, best shot is to set all of them to 0, so we get "000". Then I take my number and go through where I convert each part of it into the proper character code in my list of valid characters. The number 2 is valid, so append that to the end of the string, it becomes "002", then it's time for the next character, the dot. and that's where the problems happen. Dot is valid, but not comma. Since the number in English is 2.5, but in German it's 2,5, in English it spots the dot and pushes it at the end of the string: "02.", and then does the same for the 5: "2.5" that's the result, we're good. But in the case of the comma, it's not a valid character, so it'll stop the cycle there and send "002" as the result. In the case of the question marks for recurring characters, it's the truncation that's the problem. Before being able to push numbers into the string we need to check which decimal places we're going to stop the value at. I check "is there a decimal place?" or in code it's "is there a dot?", and in 3.333333333 it's easy to tell, so we keep whatever's before the dot as is, then remove the places of what's after the dot. So imagine I only want 10 characters: 3.3333333333333 gets trucated to 3.33333333, which fits in the max allowed string size of 10. But if there are no dots, we have a number far bigger than the allowed size, it can't really be trucated or the values is wrong. So the ???????? is a safety measure to make sure bigger numbers are prevented. It should happen the same if you try multiply 2 numbers that result in breaking the max allowed size, you should see the question marks as well. Sorry for the long comment, might not even be clear, but that's what I got. Now I'm curious to check what the actual answer is.

My theory for the first two issues, based on the behaviors, the requirements of the system, and my own experience with various ways to do binary-to-decimal number conversion routines: When displaying a number, the calculator code probably does something like the following: 1. Figure out how many digits are needed for the non-fractional portion of the number 2. Take the integer value and convert it to decimal using that number of digits 3. Subtract the non-fractional portion from the number so all you have is fractional digits remaining 4. If the number is not zero (there are fractional digits), then add a decimal point 5. Convert as many digits of the fractional portion as there are remaining spaces on the display, or until the remainder is zero The problem enters in steps 1 and 3, which are done using localized conversion routines. Step 1 is done by converting the number to a string (using built-in library routines) and counting the number of characters which come before the period. So if it gets "2.5", it finds the ".", and then it knows that there's one character ("2") in the non-fractional portion. However, if it gets "2,5" it counts three characters instead, so it does the integer conversion using three places, and gets "002" for the non-fractional portion of the number. Step 3 is then apparently done by converting the "portion before the period" from step 1 back to a number and subtracting it from the original value. In the case of period-based-decimal systems, this means it converts the string "2" back to a number, subtracts 2 from 2.5, and gets a remainder of 0.5 (great!). However, with comma-based-decimal conversions, it still thinks the non-fractional portion is "2,5", so it converts that back to a number, subtracts 2.5 from 2.5 (or subtracts 2,5 from 2,5, depending on your point of view) and gets a remainder of 0, so it then decides there are no fractional digits to display, and stops there (with final a result of "002"). In the case of repeating digits, at step 1, it counts the whole thing as the length of the non-fractional part, which is too many digits for the display, so it displays the "number too big" indicator and gives up (or just crashes). I'm not sure why when typing a non-integral number the digit before the decimal point keeps getting replaced by the most recently pressed number. I'm gonna have to think on that one for a while. It would have been helpful if they'd shown what happens with numbers with more than one non-fractional digit (e.g. "12.3456" or "123.456" etc).. (I don't actually personally own the game to try it for myself)

Another easy conversion is Polish złoty (PLN) to Romanian leu (RON) which is almost 1:1. And both numeral systems also use comma as decimal separator

This video feels like a pipe dream lmao Matt and Pokemon in 1 video

The real key is to go to a country that has its currency pegged to yours (eg, US to Barbados)

My favorite "mixing up strings and values" problem, I worked at a company that had a handful of connected systems to keep track of customer info, came across an account for a customer with the surname "Null" but when I pulled it up in one of the other systems it just showed their forename and no surname. As far as I could tell somewhere in the data connection between the two systems was passing over the string "Null" for that field but it was being interpreted as a null value...

This is like what happened when I saw the Minecraft speedrunning video. "Oh? A video about my favorite franchise of little monster dudes. My recommendations are full of those, but this one looks interesting- MATT PARKER? MY FAVORITE MATH PERSON TALKING ABOUT MY FAVORITE VIDEO GAME FRANCHISE?" You never stop surprising and delighting, Matt.

I lived in Cambodia for a few months, and in every situation I came across, they used Arabic numerals. I only ever saw the Khmer numerals (that you showed on the screen) written on the Reil bills themselves, where they were always accompanied by an Arabic numeral. It's similar to how prices are done in most parts of the world. I'm from the US, and while our dollar bills have "ONE DOLLAR" written on them, they also have the numeral "1" on the corners prices in stores are always written with Arabic numerals (e.g. on a sign you might see "$6", but you'll never see "SIX DOLLARS").

Also note that some countries use spaces instead of dots or commas to separate thousands (thinking of france here)

19:53 it makes complete sense to back up if it doesn’t find a full stop, since integers wouldn’t have one. If the calculator just has “1” or “256” or some other integer it should back up right from the end and return the right number of digits!

In danish high school maths we use comma as a decimal separator but maths programs that use the decimal point. So we have to teach the student to write 100,12 in texts, but 100.12 to do calculations in the given software.

The typed decimal will start reading the whole number from the back of the string as it's common for searches to return '-1' as the not found case. Thus it starts indexing from the back again

Finally you've re-enabled closed captioning on your videos. I can watch them again.

This was amazing. I'm so glad I found it.

I love the idea of trying to figure out the math of bugged things. So in the first games of pokemon something weird happens where you use a move that changes your stat. It applies the bonus you get from having badges again. Im wondering what kind of formula is the game using that makes it check badge boost over and over again.

This dot and ESPECIALLY comma swapping ,presented a nightmare when my teacher gave us csv files while the system language used the comma as the decimal point.

Most of the time you know what order of magnitude to expect of a number, so these differing conventions don't matter, but I've found them confusing often enough that I've switched to using a space as the thousands separator, which I believe is how the French do it.

I feel like a good test that you should have done, would be undoing the calculation and see what you get back. Do 7/3, then multiply by 3. Also, I could be wrong on this but, using an actually working calculator version of BDSP, back in the original Diamond/Pearl on the DS, it would fail at the 1/7 then multiply by 7 test, but BDSP correctly returned 1 afterwards. I would have to double check that but my Switch is over there and I can't be bothered swapping the cartridge over.

I love how, during editing, rather than look it up and put the answer in the video, he simply annotated *I didn't

Assuming the issue is indeed because of the comma/dot thing, i feel like it could have been avoided had game freak represented the decimal and thousand separator internally with a structure that was not specific to any single way of writing it. They could have had a separator enumerated type with a dec_sep and thou_sep and then they could have, when printing the values, replaced the separators with whatever symbol was appropriate for the region of the console.

I''m fairly sure 7/3=A suffusion of yellow. I may be rounding off wrong.

What most likely happened on the code side is that they did the localization too early. Just as you said, they got raw results, and stringified it. The localization step then came just a step too early. My theory is slightly different from yours, and does cover all cases: -Step 1: they initialize the way they display digits. I think that they have one sprite per digit. I doubt it's just text with a font, or the 0s would be unicode nulls, as it would be the default character. It could be that the specific formatting requirements of the way they display numbers requires them to fetch images for each digit (it would make sense), or there could be other reasons. -Step 2: they loop over each character, adding the image for each character one by one. -Step 3: they run into a character they can't handle, their call returns null, it's unhandled, it throws an error, the error is caught at a higher level (probably at the loop or function level) -Step 4: when displaying the text, the default character is 0, probably because it's the default image in their engine representation of the object. With the image not being set, it just stays on its default value. For the whole question marks thing, I think it could be a similar issue, just displayed differently: The dev that handled it could have used question marks for debugging at some point, it would be pretty standard of a way to do things. There could even be a few swear words in the logs, if it was enabled. Then, when an error occurs, either one of two things can happen: -It is caught, and displays question marks -It isn't caught, and stays in whatever state it was before, just like in the above issue There could be a bit of code especially meant to deal with long digits that is failing at 2 different places, one that was more expected than the other (thus why one is caught and not the other). EDIT: I went back and corrected a few things right after pressing post...

I loved this video! Second channel rocks

Try importing/exporting a CSV file in Excel when your locale defines comma as the decimal separator

I love ISO-conventions. The space as the 1000 separator and the comma for the decimal separator and no points in numbers whatsoever. I am so glad that we all use that. Oh… wait…

Correction: "The humble comma." is not a full sentence, as it is only the subject of a potential sentence, and therefore not a complete sentence, regardless of your addition of a full stop. I have now made myself sick with my own pedantry, but this seems like a place where that might be appreciated! Thank you so much for the amazing videos!

Now that you have done a pokemon video, you should look at the statistical manipulation and optimization used to find shiny pokemon. It's a really interesting system to increase extraordinary low percentages

I vaguely remember a comma breaking the Xenomorph AI in the game Aliens Colonial Marines. It wasn't until years later that someone going through the code saw it, fixed the typo and ran the game without much hope, but was surprised that the Xenomorphs were behaving as intended now.

I’m an iOS developer and I’ve had to diagnose and fix several bugs that were caused by differences in decimal separators like this. Big headache but good to know about.

Talking about trex vision based on movement, with a very fitting background prop…

We recently installed a piece of analytical equipment that was made in Italy. It came with a laptop to run the software, and the training engineer made us promise not to change the decimal comma to a point, because it would break everything.

From what I can tell, Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl what created using Unity, so the game engine would be in C++ but,C# would be the most likely language used for scripting the game.

the calculator thing is lore accurate, math simply does not work in the pokemon universe. that's what you get when every child at the age of 10 drops out of school in order to go on a journey with their sentient animal friend.

"PokéWatch" is actually pretty darn close to the exact name. The real name shortens both "Pokémon" and "Watch" to "Pokétch."

I love these conjecture vids about the maths going behind weird incidents in the world

I've had various issues with software that was localized "naively", that is with only the text being translated, but still using the operating system's locale. For instance, a calculator program using a French locale might properly display commas as the decimal separator, but it will not convert a numpad period input as a comma. Sometimes, a number input - the ones with the little increment and decrement pointers - will also show a comma, but when you hit submit or whatever, the app or page will tell you that it's an invalid number format. Sometimes they might even show a period but only accept a comma!

In the last Pokemon calculator example the first digit that's jumping around isn't random, it's reporting the button that was just pressed. It updates in the same "2-3-6-5-4" sequence that the user inputs. The Pokecalculator has 10 digits that it can show at any time with 3 possible states - it needs to know if it should be blank, a number, or a decimal point at any given time. Since this seems to be happening during input and not during calculation, maybe it's different logic in some other part the code. Maybe that logic requires knowing what keys were input by the user and in what order, and region specific comma notation is causing the first digit (i.e. the logic to turn a blank space into a number) to access the wrong part of memory where the value that was just pressed is stored, and not the first digit of the user's number? Blatant speculation on a Sunday evening is good for the soul

that swapping the comma and period around is so annoying because you never know what a site will accept until you type it incorrect. like the numpad has a dot between the 0 and enter but it might not be the key you need to enter for the number depending on where you enter it it's just as bad as the american date system popping up all over the internet and if the day is lower than 12 you just have to guess which date they mean

It's common for scanning code to assume it always finds something. In fact I just fixed a bug where this assumption was false today. Now when it doesn't find something, it's common to just take the last thing it has seen, because the code works like: walk through the sequence and stop when you find the thing. Now it ALSO stops when it just reaches the end of the sequence without finding anything, and there you have it.

(15:35) Until you get ISO 80000-1 formatting with 12 500,00

Punctuation is important. You forget it and it changes a vibe completely. "I'm going to eat, you?" Becomes very different.

Ooh! We've nearly got a full-blown programmer here! A bit of data structures, assembly and just maybe (arguably) some Chomsky Hierarchy and theory, and he's home! ... assuming he hasn't already explored those topics. And yes, do have a go at computing, even if you are interested just a little, and Python is a great place to start. My first guess is also Matt's first guess: string parsing. But it kinda seems even more likely (and forgivable) when you consider that one often has to program these tiny little things in assembler.

The Pokemon games are usually written in C/C++. However - the re-releases of Shining Pearl and Brilliant Diamond were made using Unity, so C# (obviously the engine itself is still C/C++).

Remember, Commas save lives. That's the caption of the poster. In the illustration, a cartoon kid is yelling out the door, "Let's eat, Grandma!"

Can't wait for the video behind that Christmas card!

There are many other pieces of notation that differ between countries. Non-sharp inequalities can be either ≤ or ⩽. Tangent function can be either tan or tg. Division can be either ÷ or :.

Thank god Matt Parker is a science educator and not a programmer. Automatic googling of currency exchange rates is probably the most insane way of obtaining those.

The separation of digits in India is even crazier. They first have 3 digits and every next set is a set of 2 digits. They don't do millions and billions, they use their own system. Pretty interesting to see 1,00,00,000 for example

it is bizarre to me that there's even a discussion. a comma is a small pause while a full stop is a complete stop. it makes sense to have a comma for seperations of the 100's and the dot being the decimal, different fractal points

A channel called pimanrules has done a full deep dive into the code for the calculator and uncovered all the mysteries

The funny thing is I switched from a language that uses the decimal comma to one that uses the decimal point and I never once realized there was even a difference 😂

I worked for a list processing company and we always had to have special procedures for any data sets coming from Canada. Decimal points used commas instead of periods and periods were users to differentiate sets, not commas.

The peso story reminds me that Rollercoaster Tycoon’s exchange rates are all in powers of 10.

commas are also sometimes used to separate multiple values, is why it may have stopped there.