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The promptly emerging Excel-Schmerz reminds me that the author avoided the use of floating point numbers in the provided example for a reason.

In german Excel it's might be ok due to its original focus on numbers, but replacing decimal "." with the german "," also forces you to use a semicolon everywhere where you would use a comma (function, vector/array notations). To me the most annoying issue with localized programming languages. And consecutive ";;;" just looks awful. And what would happen to command/line endings...

BTW, Apple once tried to translate content-specific parts of their AppleScript language (like Dialogs etc) but in the process also hit some enumerations which often sit at the border between programming language and content. Big desaster in certain edge cases.

Anyway. Of course I like that the effort was made. There are famous Asterix comic books translated into all kinds of languages and dialects. I'd really like to see great localized coding languages, but I guess they will have to avoid line ending semicolons and only use integers :)



> In german Excel it's might be ok due to its original focus on numbers, but replacing decimal "." with the german "," also forces you to use a semicolon everywhere where you would use a comma

The best part is that sometimes you get new numbers.

Excel is showing to a user what AI can do to a document: destroy it.


It somehow feels that one has to come up with a tailored strategy for each CVS import that contains decimal numbers, dates and/or other data with dots in them. Most of the time I end up regexing my way out of the failing (and different) attempts the different build-in options in Excel deliver. LibreOffice is better, Apple's Numbers partially worse in that regard. Funny to see these things in that state in 2025.

Discussing number data with current LLMs also does not seem right at the moment. Not sure if simple column-specific conversion tasks might work.




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