Thanks Byron
Whilst I do have some specific technical issues that I am trying to understand, my view is that I am dealing with my lack of cultural understanding rather than a one-off fix.
I've tried customising my regional settings to use "," as the decimal delimiter.
Now in answer to my questions I have
1/ No the regional setting is not respected - I have to type 3.14 into a column - although it gets rendered as 3,14
2/ Instead of using char, I just did 'getValues' and all value have "." as the decimal delimiter even though they are displayed as ","
The answer to (2) is good news for me in terms of working with scripts; I'm surprised by answer to (1) to the extent that I don't believe I have fully configured my system - perhaps I need to do more than just change a regional setting?
And the specific reason for asking the question is that I have a case where, in code, numbers are appearing with "," instead of "." and I'm not sure the root cause of that.
-Dave