ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade Non-US Electrical Systems & Trades Your national date format

For many a year I have customized my computer number format to using a decimal point with a space as a thousand separator.

For hours and minutes I prefer the format ‘18h30’ though I cannot persuade my computer to use this form. Revolutionary France supposedly had decimal time at some point. Does anybody know more about this or how long it lasted? Millidays have a certain je ne sais quoi!

For the record, South Africa officially used the date format yyyy-mm-dd but most people wrote dd-mm-yyyy. The decimal comma was also official though Bill Gates had thankfully made this less common due to computers demanding decimal points on entry.

In Canada:
Traditionally, commas are used to delimit thousands, a decimal point to delimit fractions of a unit.
In official parlance, spaces are often used
instead of commas.

Time is usually 12 hrs, with a colon between
Hrs/Mins, although I am well versed in 24H time (when I can, I choose clocks that can show 24H time, or modify them so they
do.) I think in French Canada that use the continental European format for time/date.

Of note, is the European standard of
displaying values of electronics,
EG 1R5 is a 1.5 ohm resistor, 2K2 is 2200 Ohms.

Here in Ireland we're starting to see problems with the use of commas and periods/fullstops in Euro prices.

(? = E as some character sets don't display ? properly yet)

Price = 2 euro 99 cent

Ireland: E 2.99
Elsewhere: 2,99 E

Generally for amounts in thousands it's far safer to avoid comma usage completely and use spaces.

e.g. E 2 000.69 can't be confused.

There's also a weird convention in Ireland that "Euro" and "Cent" have no plural (i.e. "2 euro and 15cent, not 2 euros and 15 cents). Apparently the logic being that they should be pan european words and not suffixed with various plural endings (s/en/i/es etc)

Does that apply elsewhere too?

Also the position of the Euro Symbol (?) ... We always put £ before the amount but many other countries put their symbol after the amount and are continuing to write Euro prices the same way e.g. 2,99 E(?)

...

On another convention phone numbers. The french style systems always throw me. i.e. 01.23.45.67.89

Here we tend to have 012 345 6789 and for some reason it's easier to remember in those clumps.

You also tend to get no's like 012 200 3000 (oh one two, two hundred three thousand) for business' main numbers.

1-800 XXXXXXX (one eight hundred)

The weird one in ireland is the premium rate nos.

e.g. 1550 22 99 00 (fifteen fifty, twenty two ninty nine, double zero)

Increasingly letters are being used in 1-800/1-850 and premium rate numbers as well as SMS lines.

e.g. 1-800 EIRCOM or 1-800 AER LINGUS.. seems to allow flexible number lengths to cope with names.

Djk,

You're right about the character set issue. ECN's does not include the euro symbol.

South Africa's Rand (R before the numbers) has no plural too. The cents do but are next to worthless. RSA should do an Australia and get rid of the 1c and 2c coins.

Is the French system anything to do with saying "four-twenties,ten,nine" for 99? I can't imagine saying that with a doctor's spatula on my tongue

I hadn't thought about that euro issue, but I suppose it's logical that those countries that have always put their currency symbol after the amount would just continue to do so with the new currency.

I generally write times with a colon separator, e.g. 10:15, but a lot of British publishers prefer to use 10.15 instead. Some use only a single digit for the minutes when they're below ten, e.g. 2.0 for two o'clock or 4.5 for five past four. That always looks very strange to me, and I would write 2:00 or 4:05 (followed by am or pm, if required).

Maybe Ragner can confirm this, but I seem to recall from my classes of long ago that in German the half hour is worked out a different way. In English, 5:30 would be "half past five," but I think the Germans phrase it as "half before six" or something like that.

It's amazing how many variations one can find for something so relatively simple! Even in Britain, many people would not understand the American form such as "It's ten of two."

On those French phone numbers, they not only write them in pairs but they also read them out as though each were a separate number, e.g. 23.45.67.89 is "vingt-trois, quarante-cinq.." etc. (i.e. twenty-three, forty-five....)

The standard form for phone numbers here has always been that anything from 3 to 6 digits are written in one block: 234567. Seven-digit numbers have always been split as 3/4, as in 222 1234, and the new 8-digit numbers are written as two blocks of four, e.g. 7222 1234.

The old GPO had an "official" way to read out certain numbers where there were double/triple digits. For example, 3000 would be spoken as "three, oh, double oh." One or two operators would even get quite school-marm-ish if anyone dared to ask for "three, triple oh" or (horror of horrors ) "three thousand." A number such as 22222 using their style would be "two, double two, double two."


That format has gradually crept into British usage since the 1970s as well, although I'm not keen on it myself. The "nano" prefix (most often used on capacitance values) started to be used about the same time as well and is now very common here, e.g. 10nF instead of 0.01uF.

[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 06-14-2003).]

Paul:

Eircom always automatically announces numbers with a pause / stressed number at each block of nos.

They seem to have dropped announcing "double-zero" etc. I guess it could confuse non-native English speakers and complicates things generally.

the format here is :

5-digit: 099 22 222 (Being phased out)
6-digit: 099 222 222 (Being phased out)
or 7-digit: 099 222 2222
8-digit is only used for voicemail by prefixing the no with 5 so it's written as 099 5 222 2222

There are also a few non-standard area codes left.
01 - Dublin (takes in more than 1/3 of the countrys population!)
and a few 0X0X codes (all gone this year)
No idea what, if anything, will be done with Dublin's code. I think it will be changed to 03X as it runs out of numbering space.

They also suggest that you don't put the area code in brackets anymore as for years it has made no difference wheather you dial it or omit it in you own area.

Paul,
I work with a Dutch Electrician from time to time.
And he uses the comma instead of a decimal point.
As an aside, Paul, my keyboard has a Euro sign on it, next to the number 5 key, as well as a % sign, how is this used?.

The "official" way of writing phone numbers has changed over the years here. Before the days of STD (Subscriber Trunk Dialing), it was just exchange and number, e.g. Derby 23456.

When STD came in, the GPO recommended adding the code but still listing the exchange name, like this:

Derby (0DE2) 23456

When letters were dropped, that would become:

Derby (0332) 23456

The reason was that callers in the local area did not use the STD code but would instead have to dial a local routing code, so they needed the exchange name in order to look it up on the list.

The national format for showing how to dial to a small dependent exchange could look quite odd. For example, a village named Zelah near to where I once lived had to be accessed via the STD code of its group switching center, which was Truro (0872).

Anyone in Truro could call Zelah by dialing 54 plus the local 3-digit number, so the format for showing a Zelah number was:

Zelah (0872 54) 234.

The six big cities (London, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, and Manchester) with 7-digit numbers generally had numbers listed with the STD code followed by a dash, e.g. 01-222 1234.

These days, the exchange names have pretty much been dropped and just the area code and local number given, e.g. (01692) 585000, or just 01692 585000. Many people now probably don't even know the name of their local CO.

As you said for Ireland, our network now will accept the full number and recognize it as a local call, even if you start by dialing your own area code.

Trumpy,
The British PC-style keyboards have some peculiar variations. The pound sterling sign (£) is located on shifted-3, and the # sign has is moved to an extra key over near the right hand side. For some peculiar reason, they also have " and @ the opposite way around to American keyboards, along with a few other minor changes.

The British variants also retained the original PC keyboard quirk of having the backslash (\) key located between the left-hand shift and Z. The American versions corrected that when the AT keyboard came out, thank goodness. I use an American-layout keyboard on my systems, and when I have to use a British one one someone else's system I'm always getting extra \ characters where I've gone for the left shift key.

The keyboards on sale here now have added the euro symbol to the top right of the 4 key, next to the dollar sign. I think its use will depend upon your keyboard configuration and code page settings.

There are still a few slightly different versions of keyboards used here in Ireland and the Euro symbol has been added now too.

There are still slight differences to how Apple and PC manufactures layout the keyboard too.

E.g. The majority of UK Mac keyboards don't have a # key at all. It's alt+3 and ? (euro) is alt+2 (marked out on the keyboard)

Re Phone nos:

Some people here will still insist on saying "Dublin 777 7777" or just 777 7777 rather than 01 - 777 7777. Up until the mid-90s most Dubliners didn't seem to think they even had an area code it was only with the advent the massive uptake of mobile phones that they realised that (01) exsisted!

(There are now substantialy more GSM mobile lines than fixed lines! IRL has one of the highest mobile penetration rates in the world)

It's beginning to cause a lot of confusion as Dublin and Cork are no longer the only areas with 7-Digits so having just the local number on stationary won't automatically mean people dial 01 or 021.

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Some eircom switches (and those of other companies) actually accept the full international format number too. GSM networks have always done this.

E.g. if your number was 021 888 8888 you could dial 00 353 21 888 8888 and it will go thru and be charged as local rate.
----

There's also the weird shortcut for Northern Ireland here. It originated from a need to identify NI calls as "national" for billing reasons. I presume that the old Xbar switches actually routed calls over the boarder rather than across the channel and back again. There is also a huge volume of cross-boarder calls so I guess it would have been useful to treat it as normal trunk traffic than as International. Until recently you simply prefixed the old NI area code with 08. E.g. Belfast was 01232 so you dialled 0801232.

NI = 028 in the UK (+44 28) and 8-Digit number.

From the Republic of Ireland you simply replace 028 with 048. Actually intergrates NI into the geographical North East area code system (04)

You can also dial 00 44 28 and will be charged at "National Rate" Some old (private) payphones etc can have problems with that though.

+ 353 48 XXXX XXXX doesn't exsist from abroad though.

Access to GB was also via 03 + area code until sometime in the 90s when the shortcode was phased out under some EU / ITU rule.

Did that exsist in other countries ? (other than places like Andora / Monaco) E.g. between the Benelux countries or in Scandinavia?

------

There is a slow but defintate migration here to a standardised number length etc.

0XX - XXX-XXXX

They've also created a voicemail numbering space simply by prefixing the area code with 03
E.g. the mailbox for 021 999 9999 is 03021 999 9999

(Previously these numbers would have been network specific and hidden in the case of fixed lines or accessed by prefixing the local no with 5 in mobiles.)

Eircom provides free voicemail to all customers who want it. (They make more money when there is no busy tone and all call attempts are answered)

They insist on calling Voicemail "Call Answering" though! (Rather strange name). It rolled out in about 1992/3.

It's quite sophisticated, logs caller ID details etc, accepts SMS messages and reads them out if you don't have an SMS capable home phone. Allows messaging between mailboxes, forwarding messages etc etc.. pretty much like a fancy office system.

Kinda handy if you don't wanna talk to someone though

[This message has been edited by djk (edited 06-15-2003).]