Thanks all for the replies (I'm Tony's friend from work). Having suffered through a cold rainy Seattle spring a vision of my trip to Italy last fall popped into my head on Friday as I was typing up a number and accidentally hit the comma rather than the period, leading somewhat circuitously to my question. Sorry to lump Great Britain in with the continent - I should have known better, what with the millimeters and miles and the driving on the left and all. And what's up with the Swiss??? Although I gotta say, from a mathematical perspective it kinda makes sense to use a (sort of) superscript to separate powers of ten.

Being a McNeill myself with a family tree full of Scots I was amused by the "Brit" vs. "English" comments. Coincidentally I'm just now reading a book on the Scottish Enlightenment and the Acts of Union of 1707, which made the English and Scots all officially "Brits". It was kind of funny and a little sad that some of the pro-union Scots wanted to call themselves "North Britons" while you'd have been hard pressed to find an Englishman willing to forgo "English" for "South Briton". But anyway, it was a fascinating century for Scotland - I'm not quite sure what it says about my ancestors that that's right about the time they all decided to migrate to North Carolina.

Eric