Punctuation the marks hierarchically, in terms of weight". Cecil Hartley's poem identifies their relative values: <poem style=margin:4em;> The stop point out, with truth, the time of pause A sentence doth require at ev'ry clause. At ev'ry comma, stop while "one" you count; At semicolon, "two" is the amount; A colon doth require the time of "three"; The period "four", as learned men agree. </poem> The use of punctuation was not standardised until after the invention of printing. According to the 1885 edition of "The American Printer", the importance of punctuation was noted in various sayings by children such as: <poem style=margin:4em;>
Comma distinguish it from the Arabic diacritic "" (), representing the vowel , which is similarly comma-shaped. In Arabic texts, Western-styled comma () is used as a decimal point. Reversed comma () is used in Sindhi when written in Arabic script. It is different from the standard Arabic comma. Hebrew script is also written from right to left. However, Hebrew punctuation includes only a regular comma (). Dravidian languages such as Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam also use the punctuation mark in similar usage to that of European languages with similar spacing. In the common character encoding systems Unicode and ASCII,