Dave noted in Savannah #61371[1] that there hadn't been much follow-up on this.
> However, Keith's claim that "decimal separator" is "invalid > terminology" is contradicted by Wikipedia's extensive, and extensively > annotated, entry for the term > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator>, which also says that > "radix point" is the more general term used when bases other than 10 > are under consideration. However, as I think Ralph might remind us, Wikipedia is not authoritative. At 2021-11-01T22:48:21+0000, Keith Marshall wrote: > On 01/11/2021 13:19, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > > gbranden pushed a commit to branch master > > in repository groff. > > > > commit a0ec5ffd258b9f54daa46b88471ec837e8213ad1 > > Author: Bjarni Ingi Gislason <[email protected]> > > AuthorDate: Sun Oct 31 00:42:09 2021 +0000 > > > > tbl(1): Say decimal "separator", not "point". > > Surely, the correct English-language terminology is "radix point", There is little in English language usage that is apodictic. > (and where the radix is "decimal", this becomes "decimal point"). It > is irrelevant whether the prevailing convention, of the user's locale, > is to represent the radix point by a comma, or a period, we do *not* > refer to a "decimal comma", or a "decimal period", (or a "decimal > dot"); the correct terminology is "decimal point". tbl(1) itself doesn't recognize any number base other than decimal, and overgeneralizing could mislead the reader into an inference that it does. > This change introduces invalid terminology, and should be reverted. I don't agree. POSIX uses the terms "decimal delimiter" and "radix character"[2]. On the commercial side, Oracle[3] and Microsoft[4] both use the term "decimal separator" in technical documentation. On the more general international standardization front, apparently the term "decimal marker" is preferred[5], at least by the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM). Given that the table option name to which the commit refers is "decimalpoint", which goes back to 1970s AT&T tbl, has no synonym in any tbl implementation I'm aware of, and therefore would be inadvisable to withdraw in a short time frame, the reader's view of your approved terminology is not obscured. In a more purely mathematical context, I prefer the term "radix point", myself. Anyone have access to authoritative sources that might weigh on the issue? Regards, Branden [1] https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?61371 [2] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap07.html [3] in "Solaris Internationalization Overview" https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19455-01/806-0169/overview-9/index.html [4] in a document hierarchy with a root named "Globalization overview" https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/globalization/locale/number-formatting [5] https://web.archive.org/web/20210121220851/https://www.bipm.org/utils/en/pdf/Resol22CGPM-EN.pdf
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