Coins of the pound sterling of all coins except the £2. The original intention was to exclude both the £1 and £2 coins from the redesign because they were "relatively new additions" to the coinage, but it was later decided to include the £1 coin. This was the first wholesale change to British coinage since the first decimal coins were introduced in April 1968. The new coins were initially to be put into circulation in early 2008, although they did not actually start to appear until mid-2008. The major design feature was the introduction of a reverse design shared across six coins (1p, 2p, 5p,
Decimal separator In the Middle Ages, before printing, a bar ( ¯ ) over the units digit was used to separate the integral part of a number from its fractional part, e.g. 995 (meaning, 99.95 in decimal point format). This practice derived from the decimal system used in Indian mathematics and was popularized by the Persian mathematician Al-Khwarizmi, when Latin translation of his work on the Indian numerals introduced the decimal positional number system to the Western world. His "Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing" presented the first systematic solution of linear and quadratic equations in Arabic. A similar notation