On 2007-10-12, Paul McGuire <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I've been to Japan and Europe too, and I can't even figure out > how many digits a phone number is supposed to have!
I was shocked at utterly foreign and lost I felt looking at phone numbers in various places overseas. I could deal with phone numbers having other than 7/10 digits and being punctuated differently, but in some places the number of digits in a phone number is apparently random. Even among phone numbers of the same length, the formatting (where the spaces/hyphens) go, seems to be more-or-less random. [Here in the US, a phone number is always the same length: 10 digits (though you only have to dial the first 3 if they're different than your own). Back in the pre-cellular days, given just the first two digits of a phone number, you even knew whether it was going to be all 10 digits or just 7.] People speaking a different language was fine. Driving on the other side of the road was fine. Colorful money with rediculous exchange rates was fine. Daytime being the wrong length was definitely strange. But, phone numbers not having a fixed length and format? That's utter madness! -- Grant Edwards grante Yow! Oh my GOD -- the at SUN just fell into YANKEE visi.com STADIUM!! -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list