Euro convention?

[Peter Why]

I was given a beautiful book on illusionary art for Christmas (Masters of Deception). After reading it, I would like to buy a print from a Swiss artist (Sandro Del-Prete) ... one of the ones on this page: http://im-possible.info/english/art/del ... te_o1.html#

However, I don't know the convention for describing amounts of euros. On the page at the end of this sentence, I think I would be paying to download pictures of different resolution for me to print ( http://www.sandrodelprete.com/index.php ... atter.html ). Could someone tell me what 48,00 € is, please? (that is, is it 48 euros or 4800 euros? (or, awfully, 48,000 euros!)

Peter

[GrayHouse]

Hi Peter,
It's more of a number convention than a euro convention. Many countries use a comma as the decimal separator. It makes life more interesting for software developers...
So I'd read that as €48.
Regards,
-Ian

ETA: Looking at that article, Switzerland actually seems to be the most complicated but I'm sure the website is using the common European convention. If you click on the UK flag at the top of the web site, it all changes to "." (dot) separators.

[Peter Why]

Thanks, Ian, I missed the flag; I had been translating bits of the page with Google Translate.

Peter

[Availle]

Yes, it's 48 EUR. Actually, it costs 2 EUR + 48 EUR = 50 EUR


Fun, and only slightly related fact: In Japan, when handwriting (as in my soroban class), the standard comma is used to separate thousands. And an "inverted comma" (ie., pointing from up left to down right) is used to separate the decimals. This is not an issue with money (usually) since the smallest coin is one yen, but for other things it can be crucial...

[Peter Why]

These things seem so subtle and missable when they're in another language, but we spot them so easily when they're in ours (like the difference in English between "its" and "it's", and the shapes of the opening and closing quotes around speech).

Peter