Re: Calculator digits in Arabic countries?

On Fri, 24 Jan 2003, Nicholas Bodley wrote:

> Surely, electronic calculators must be relatively commonplace
> in lands where the Arabic alphabet is primary. Being a
> retired electronic tech. and calculator enthusiast, I'm
> especially curious to know whether these lands use
> calculators that display correct numeral glyphs for their
> culture.

I live in a Iran, where one rarely sees European digits on displays or in
documents. But all the calculators and rulers and things like those always
use European digits. I've yet to see a single commercial calculator using
Arabic-Indic digits.

Children learn to read the European digits in second or third year of
elementary school.

> On a related matter, I find it not the easiest to learn how
> these lands write numbers with thousands separators and
> decimal points. The "Arabic-Indic" zero can't be confused
> with a decimal point, of course.

There are two styles of a decimal separator used in Iran (for the Persian
language). The traditional one is very similiar on both shape and size to
the Arabic Letter Reh, sometimes indistinguishable even. The modern one is
like a slash, but lowered and a little shorter in height.

For the thousands separator we use a high tick. It may sometimes become
apostroph-like, or just a short vertical line or like an opening single
quotation mark. The exact shape depends on the writer or the font.

roozbeh