On Sat, 29 Jan 2005 09:40:48 -0500, Peter T. Daniels
<grammatim@...> wrote:

> As we learned four years ago when she first came to national attention.

It was new to me, recently.

> What, though, does this have to do with writing systems?

That's something I did give some thought to: What a major difference a
very-slight change in a small body of text can sometimes make. Obviously,
small e and small c are quite close in appearance. This reminds me that it
was stated in a discussion of typography, a certain Fraktur type face had
only 40 millionths of a square inch difference between s(iirc) small k and
small f.

As to the decimal separator in Europe, I think a comma makes sense,
because an unwanted dot in a poor-copy image could be image noise, or it
could be a real decimal point. The probability of a random tiny dark spot
looking like a comma is a good bit less than its looking like a comma.
Working in past decades from diazo copies of engineering drawings, I
became very aware of the possibility of unwanted dots.

The decimal point in the HP 33s calculator is nearly invisible; changing
to the European convention makes it usable.

Regards,

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass.
The curious hermit -- autodidact and polymath
Freedom from hypocrisy is a very good idea.