decimal point

i'd like to hear Ninc's reasons for his demmand, if possible.

why do you consider the comma so important?

Sorry for late answer...

They use comma, as you can see that on this Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

And IMHO GeoGebra should request the decimal mark character from the operating system and also allow user to change that somewhere on the Options menu.

Sorry for late answer...

I don't see how can it be NOT important... If comma is the decimal mark, that should be used. If point, than point. Any other character considered mis-spelling. To read by humans is sometimes just unbeutiful, sometimes misleading. To read by softwares it can mess things up, like the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter caused by metric mixup.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

IMHO especially softwares dealing with numbers and developed for international users (like GeoGebra) definitely should handle this situation.

Hi ...

whats about pocket calculators. There are many versions and the pupils need to learn to them, too.

The pupil should be flexibel enough!!

Birgit

hello

if you let comma for number then when a=2 the 5*(3,4a+1) expression could be the point (15,35) or the number 39

saludos

The decimal point or radix point see Wikipedia has be an argument for sometime as in the article.

Currently, as the article points out, many programming languages follow the conventions of the English. IMHO, it could probably be programmed to work with a comma, but I would think that the group to ask for this option would be the developers of Java. As I believe that this is a core issue with the programming language. However, I could be wrong.

Tony

Hi Tony,

yes, you are wrong :) Even if Java programmers did it (and there are many good reasons for which they never will), it won't help GeoGebra a bit. Howgh.

@Nincs: I understand the need of comma (in Czech republic we also use it and kids of certain age are not used to use period), but to make it happen, we would have to use comma for decimals, semicolon in points and lists and think of some new syntax for polar points. All of this will make GeoGebra's internal part much more complex and bug-prone. Such thing would be for sure a long run (=> surely not a 4.0 feature). IMHO it's worth further discussion.

I do not mind being wrong, and I agree that the feature is worth discussion.

Thanks, kondr for helping us to understand. I agree that students do have difficulty seeing things in different countries. It is worth knowing.

Tony

Sure it requires additional work from programmers. And I just add some (kind of) philosophical argument: the machines are for us, not vice versa, softwares to adapt to humans, not vice versa.

That is not the issue. This is the problem:

so it is not possible to add what you want.

I'm studying maths in Denmark.

We're allowed to use CAS programs, but in DK we use commas, not decimal points. So I'll have to fiddle with GeoGebra in order to use it.

Of course this could be fixed programmatically. You could have an input format using point and a displayformat using commas. In case of a point you could use ((15,35), (17,8)) as displayformat. Since you already know that it's a 2d-point, the meaning is very clear. Other more elegant solutions may already exist.

It's a must for me, and a lot of other users to be able to display values with decimal-comma. It's not us being picky or ridden by obsessive compulsive streaks in our personality - we simply have no choice.

I second the motion for a solution to this problem