An older convention uses dots to separate thousands (with commas for decimals) — this older practice makes it easier to avoid word breaks with larger numbers. Historically, in Germany and Austria, thousands separators were occasionally denoted by alternating uses of comma and point, e.g. 1.234,567.890,12[56][57] for "eine Milliarde 234 Millionen ...", but this is never seen in modern days and requires explanation to a contemporary German reader. Switzerland: There are two cases: An apostrophe as a thousands separator along with a dot "." as the decimal separator are used for currency values (for example: 1'234'567.89).