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From: dww@stl.UUCP (David Wright)
Newsgroups: net.internat
Subject: Re: I hate to say I told you so...
Message-ID: <270@stl.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 21-Jan-86 14:24:55 EST
Article-I.D.: stl.270
Posted: Tue Jan 21 14:24:55 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 24-Jan-86 08:36:29 EST
References: <274@ivax.icdoc.UUCP> <1762@cbosgd.UUCP>
Reply-To: dww@stl.UUCP (David Wright)
Organization: STL,Harlow,UK.
Lines: 25

In article <1762@cbosgd.UUCP> mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) writes:
> ...
>>Is this a dollar or a pound ? $
>
>I never understood why the British decided to put their currency symbol
>on top of the 3 and leave the $ on shift 4, instead of putting their
>currency symbol in the "currency symbol" slot.  

I for one am glad that the pound sign (on my US-made VT100) is NOT on
the same key as the dollar sign, as I often have to use both in the
same document - e.g.  when preparing purchasing budgets etc. for
US-made gear where both dollar and sterling prices are shown.   In the
old days, when we were part of ITT, virtually every financial document
used both currencies.  In such documents pound seldom clashes with hash
(tho' fortunately the word processor we use can handle both on the same
document when it has to), but it would be nice to have totally separate
characters.   

The dollar sign also gets used a lot in program source code, where the
pound sign just looks silly - probably because of unfamiliarity in that
application.

So even in Europe we do need the dollar sign.  Sometimes we get
"Europeanised" software that shows the pound sign wherever the dollar
character appears in the ASCII file, and it's a real pain.