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Comment by arrrg | Hacker News Reader

This seems like an awfully whiny and egocentric opinion.

Look, the world won’t end if sometimes those symbols cannot be displayed. We do have two or three letter abbreviations for currencies. But in the long it should be our goal to create systems that can deal with new symbols easily and that have the assumptions that symbols will change and new ones will be introduced built into them. Because that’s how it is. Actually.

It seems to me here that in this case it’s very much the web that’s broken, not the new symbol.

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But what's the benefit or rationale for having a new symbol? As far as I can tell, it seems to mostly consist of thinly veiled nationalism: "all the big countries have one, so we need one too". See for example this:

Now India wants something that no global economic powerhouse should be without: an international symbol for its currency. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7923825.stm

And it's not as if the existing "Rs", "TL", "KSh" etc don't work. So by introducing a new symbol, the country creates a lot of real problems (not just in IT, but for everybody who needs to enter or display the new symbol; where's the " ₹" button on your keyboard?), just for a vague sense of nationalist pride and prestige.

Is there anything wrong with that? If the Kenyan Shilling is as important as they describe in the article, then why should they have to be stuck with a second rate symbol using latin letters? Do you think the Euro should just use $ or EU$ or something else that doesn't convey the fact that the euro is not called the Euro dollar, but has its own name?

One of the reasons I like using OS X is that, from what I can tell, 99.99% of developers don't have to worry about this stuff. They let the system handle text and font rendering, and when the new Kenyan Shilling symbol is adopted, their apps will render it without having to do any work.

As it happens, $ is originally the peso sign. When is the US going to stop using a secondhand symbol shamelessly stolen from the Mexicans?

At the end of the day, you don't need unique symbols to distinguish currencies, because 99.9% of the time you're only dealing with one at a time and, for the remaining 0.01%, there are ISO standard codes that are guaranteed unique. (Unlike "$", mind you.) In Finland, prices at markets were usually written "5,-" in the pre-euro days, and that perfectly clear notation continues to be used after the mark was switched to the euro.

The dash in "5,-" simply means that there are no decimals. When you write a price like this which does have decimals, it looks just like a regular number, for example "4,99"... And then you may need something to indicate the unit.

The euro sign is a good solution because it resolves the ambiguity of how to write out the currency unit. Here are some ways how the price 0.99 EUR can be written in Finnish:

  0,99 euroa
  99 senttiä
  0,99 EUR
  0,99 €

Multiply this by 20+ nations and you get a lot of different ways to write a price...! Without the euro symbol, there wouldn't be a single reasonably consistent way to write a price in the Euro zone.

Don't forget that there are countries in the Euro zone that use the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets. Just the word "euro" spelled out may be unrecognizable if you don't know the alphabet.

The European banknotes have the word "EURO" on them three different ways: Romance (EURO), Greek (ΕΥΡΩ), and (since 2013) Cyrillic (ЕВРО).

I swear I once saw a picture which was like a Huffman coding table for the spelling of Europe in every European language, but I can't find it now - anyone seen it? It started with a big E, and then had U and Y above on another, and so on.

It's on the energy rating cards that appliances have too.

Thanks! That's the one, I remember the coloured bars next to it now, and it's the word energy, not Europe. See one at http://blog.calpeda.com/2011/08/calpeda-europump/

It makes trouble for us that DO use a "peso" as official currency.

In our countries, the US dollar is normally written as U$S, U$, or US$.

Such temerity! They'll want their own flag next.

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