Separating arguments to a function, in locales with comma as decimal marker

Posted by Chris Pousset on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Chris Pousset
Published on 2010-05-24T18:58:29Z Indexed on 2010/05/24 19:01 UTC
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Filed under:

localization

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functions

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numbers

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delimiter

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comma

In locales, e.g. French, with comma as decimal indicator (where "5,2" means five and two-tenths), how do users separate function arguments from each other?

For example, in many programming/scripting languages, I could specify MAX(1.5, X) in a EN-US locale. How do you avoid the ambiguity between the comma as decimal indicator, and as argument separator?

In particular, I'm interested in how software that's perceived as user-friendly in the foreign locale does it. Obviously, it's a no-brainer to say, "thou shalt use decimal POINTs", but that's not particularly "friendly".

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