Peter T. Daniels wrote:

>
> Since people use computers to balance their checkbook, why don't you
> hold these discussions on an accountants' list?

Accountants probably *do* discuss ways to balance checkbooks on some of
their lists.

Having been responsible in the past for the internationalization and
localization of Intuit's Quickbooks into Japanese, I can tell you that
there were an awful lot of issues related to writing systems among those
that needed to be addressed when porting this most popular small
business checkbook managing software.

Probably don't need to go into the details here, for they are generally
related to the standard i18n/l10n issues, but they also went beyond that
into ways of writing currency symbols and amounts, layout preferences
and requirements for reports, indexing methods, and others. All matters
with a thorough understanding of underlying writing systems at the core.

Best,

Barry