Talk:Decimal currency

I would like to find a reference or data concerning the number of countries in the world that still use a non-decimal currency.

If anyone out there knows where to find this information I would be very grateful. mailto://dex@ieee.org


 * If we can find information of other non-decimal systems, it would be worth making a separate page for it. 6 July 2005 20:23 (UTC)

Malagasy Ariary
I doubt that the Malagasy currency is a non-decimal one. Actually they were using the Malagasy Franc after independance that was subdivided as the French Francs into centimes. During socialist times the local malgache language replaced French in many aeas of public life (adminsitration, school) so they wanted to get rid of the reference to the (Franch) Francs and introduced the Ariary. Due to inflation the centimes was already useless during that time and a calculatory rate of 5 Malgache Francs to 1 one Ariary was introduced. In the early 90s when I was working in Madagascar the manner on the market was that traders assumed you ment a price in Francs Malgache if who spoke French and Ariary if you spoke Malgache. Banknotes indicated the sums in both units. So basically the two existed in parallel. I think I read that today the banknotes only indicate Ariary and the Ariary has no subdivision. (Sven Schade, naberera2000@yahoo.de)

History
I've rewritten parts of the two closing paragraphs, which seemed rather POV to me: I might caricature the old wording as "We used to have the wonderful ability to say £1 = 240d. so £(1/15) = 16d., and now we've copied the stupid dollar just because it was more convenient for electronic transactions." The subdivisions of the pound were even described in the present tense, showing the backward-looking point of view.

The real reason for the rise of decimal currency has to be that it's simply more convenient for most purposes, and I've put that in.

In fact, electronic transactions are not an advantage of decimal currency: it's trivial for computers to be programmed to deal with mixed units. The advantage is in other computations, where you can add $19.50 and $4.95 the same way that you add 1,950 and 495, or find 7% of $27.80 the same way that you'd find 7% of 2,780. That's true whether you're doing it in your head, on paper, or with a calculator.

I've also shortened the list of subdivisions of the pound, but I've mentioned explicitly how many there are, and also acknowledged that there are additional subdivisions because of the farthing.

66.96.28.244 03:29, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

more pov?
I have to agree with the user above about decimal probably just being more convenient. Can we find some references for this line? Otherwise, it should be removed as POV.

"Further impetus was given by the rise of the decimal U.S. dollar to the status of the world's leading currency during the 20th century" Bihal 23:33, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

A month later and I'm doing the update. Bihal 05:44, 31 July 2006 (UTC)