Space (punctuation) in the context of Decimal point

Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of written text should be read (silently or aloud) and, consequently, understood. The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, consisting of points between the words and horizontal strokes between sections. The alphabet-based writing began with no spaces, no capitalization, no vowels (see abjad), and with only a few punctuation marks, as it was mostly aimed at recording business transactions. Only with the Greek playwrights (such as Euripides and Aristophanes) did the ends of sentences begin to be marked to help actors know when to make a pause during performances. Punctuation includes space between words and both obsolete and modern signs.

By the 19th century, grammarians explained the difference between the punctuation marks by means of a hierarchy that ascribed different weight to them. Six marks, proposed in 1966 by the French author Hervé Bazin, could be seen as predecessors of emoticons and emojis.

An acronym is an abbreviation formed using the initial letters of a multi-word name or phrase. Acronyms are often spelled with the initial letter of each word in all caps with no punctuation.

In English the word is used in two ways. In the narrow sense, an acronym is a sequence of letters (representing the initial letters of words in a phrase) when pronounced together as a single word; for example, NASA, NATO, or laser. In the broad sense, the term includes this kind of sequence when pronounced letter by letter (such as GDP or USA). Sources that differentiate the two often call the former acronyms and the latter initialisms or alphabetisms. However, acronym is popularly used to refer to either concept, and both senses of the term are attributed as far back as the 1940s. Dictionary and style-guide editors dispute whether the term acronym can be legitimately applied to abbreviations which are not pronounced as words, and there is no general agreement on standard acronym spacing, casing, and punctuation.

In Unicode, a script is a collection of letters and other written signs used to represent textual information in one or more writing systems. Some scripts support only one writing system and language, for example, Armenian. Other scripts support many different writing systems; for example, the Latin script supports English, French, German, Italian, Vietnamese, Latin itself, and several other languages. Some languages make use of multiple alternate writing systems and thus also use several scripts; for example, in Turkish, the Arabic script was used before the 20th century but transitioned to Latin in the early part of the 20th century. More or less complementary to scripts are symbols and Unicode control characters.

The unified diacritical characters and unified punctuation characters frequently have the "common" or "inherited" script property. However, the individual scripts often have their own punctuation and diacritics, so that many scripts include not only letters but also diacritic and other marks, punctuation, numerals and even their own idiosyncratic symbols and space characters.

An acronym is an abbreviation formed using the initial letters of a multi-word name or phrase. Acronyms are often spelled with the initial letter of each word in all caps with no punctuation.

In English, the word is used in two ways. In the narrow sense, an acronym is a sequence of letters (representing the initial letters of words in a phrase) when pronounced together as a single word; for example, NASA, NATO, or laser. In the broad sense, the term includes this kind of sequence when pronounced letter by letter (such as GDP or USA). Sources that differentiate the two often call the former acronyms and the latter initialisms or alphabetisms. However, acronym is popularly used to refer to either concept, and both senses of the term are attributed as far back as the 1940s. Dictionary and style-guide editors dispute whether the term acronym can be legitimately applied to abbreviations which are not pronounced as words, and there is no general agreement on standard acronym spacing, casing, and punctuation.

In computing and telecommunications, a control character or non-printing character (NPC) is a code point in a character set that does not represent a written character or symbol. They are used as in-band signaling to cause effects other than the addition of a symbol to the text. All other characters are mainly graphic characters, also known as printing characters (or printable characters), except perhaps for "space" characters. In the ASCII standard there are 33 control characters, such as code 7, BEL, which might ring a bell.

A whitespace character is a character data element that represents white space when text isrendered for display by a computer.

For example, a space character (U+0020   SPACE, ASCII 32) represents blank space such as a word divider in a Western script.

In punctuation, a word divider is a form of glyph which separates written words. In languages which use the Latin, Cyrillic, and Arabic alphabets, as well as other scripts of Europe and West Asia, the word divider is a blank space, or whitespace. This convention is spreading, along with other aspects of European punctuation, to Asia and Africa, where words are usually written without word separation.

In character encoding, word segmentation depends on which characters are defined as word dividers.

An interpunct ·, also known as an interpoint, middle dot, middot, or centered dot, is a punctuation mark consisting of a vertically centered dot used for interword separation in Classical Latin. (Word-separating spaces did not appear until some time between 600 and 800 CE.) It appears in a variety of uses in some modern languages.

The multiplication dot or "dot operator" is frequently used in mathematical and scientific notation, and it may differ in appearance from the interpunct.

General Punctuation is a Unicode block containing punctuation, spacing, and formatting characters for use with all scripts and writing systems. Included are the defined-width spaces, joining formats, directional formats, smart quotes, archaic and novel punctuation such as the interrobang, and invisible mathematical operators.

Additional punctuation characters are in the Supplemental Punctuation block and sprinkled in dozens of other Unicode blocks.

Scriptio continua (Latin for 'continuous script'), also known as scriptura continua or scripta continua, is a style of writing without spaces or other marks between the words or sentences. The form also lacks punctuation, diacritics, or distinguished letter case. In the West, the oldest Greek and Latin inscriptions used word dividers to separate words in sentences; however, Classical Greek and late Classical Latin both employed scriptio continua as the norm. The scriptio continua is also known as Latin skeleton script.

An acronym is an abbreviation formed using the initial letters of a multi-word name or phrase. Acronyms are often spelled with the initial letter of each word in all caps with no punctuation.

In English, the word is used in two ways. In the narrow sense, an acronym is a sequence of letters (representing the initial letters of words in a phrase) when pronounced together as a single word, like NASA, NATO, or laser. In the broad sense, the term includes this kind of sequence when pronounced letter by letter (such as GDP or USA). Sources that differentiate the two often call the former acronyms and the latter initialisms or alphabetisms. However, acronym is popularly used to refer to either concept, and both senses of the term are attributed as far back as the 1940s. Dictionary and style-guide editors dispute whether the term acronym can be legitimately applied to abbreviations which are not pronounced as words, and there is no general agreement on standard acronym spacing, casing, and punctuation.

In computer programming, indentation style is a convention or style, governing the indentation of lines of source code. An indentation style generally specifies a consistent number of whitespace characters before each line of a block, so that the lines of code appear to be related, and dictates whether to use spaces or tabs as the indentation character.