On Sat, 27 May 2017, at 16:24, gwmf...@openmailbox.org wrote: > A lot of Europe does it, and it is wrong! It goes back quite a while to > when it was fashionable to use a dot (.) as a symbol for multiplication.
I don't think it's a straightforward as that. Mathematics (at university level) uses dot that way, sometimes. But is also uses adjacency of symbols so eg "xy" means x times y, as may "x.y". > So Europe stopped using a dot to signal a decimal point to avoid > confusion (they should have stopped stopped using a dot as a symbol for > multiplication). In the U.S. and G.B. an X was used for multiplication > symbol so they continued on using a dot for decimal (as it should be). But mathematics also used dot and x to refer to concepts named dot-product and cross-product. In other words, what's acceptable/normal depends entirely on the audience. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
