Re: decimal point/comma (was conplaneteering)
| From: | Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, February 15, 2005, 20:06 |
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On Tue, Feb 15, 2005 at 08:45:40PM +0100, Philip Newton wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Feb 2005 18:05:06 +0000, Keith Gaughan <kmgaughan@...> wrote:
> > Strictly speaking, it's a raised dot that's used in the
> > anglophone world
>
> Ah! Nostalgia.
Indeed. The raised decimal point goes with those mixed-height numerals
(which someone was talking about on here for use in conlang orthography
since they blend with letters better). It's a dated usage now, however;
even in fancily typeset mathematics, the decimal point is the same as a
full stop. These days, a raised dot is a symbol for multiplication,
used when simple juxtaposition is ambiguous or for special cases like
the vector dot product.
Which reminds me - where did the × and ÷ symbols come from? Everyone
learns them in early grades, and they show up as labels on calculator
keys, but they're never used in actual mathematics notation . . .
-Marcos
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