Computers still live in their own world

   Meanwhile, here’s another bug in Windows, which I discovered some years ago but was reminded of again. In the English language, the decimal point, according to Hart’s Rules, should be floating. This is so it can be distinguished from the full stop, full point or period. But try feeding it in to Windows, as I did here:    It doesn’t work. Windows will accept it but there are programs which will throw a hissy-fit, including Photoshop, which, of course, we have to use for work. I am still wondering if the en dash, as the negative sign, will work—I can’t remember if that had given me grief the last time I fed it in. So I have to put up with using standards on my own computer that are not in English, but in technobabble, a standard that probably emerged because typewriters themselves once lacked the floating decimal point.
   But if typewriters were the standard that inputting must be judged by in the 21st century, then there should be no digit 1 (think back early enough and some typewriter manufacturers expected us to use the lowercase l) or exclamation point (in the old days, dumb apostrophe–backspace–full point). There should also be no en dashes or em dashes. Oh, wait, there still aren’t, though even commoners’ junk like Microsoft Word will know how to substitute the space–hyphen–space combination with a spaced en dash. What, I wonder, is the objection to the proper decimal point as used under the English convention?