The Full stop reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004
(provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Full stop

Time you got around to sponsoring a child
Punctuation marks
; apostrophe ('), (’) ; brackets ((, )), ([, ]), ({, }), (〈, 〉) ; colon (:) ; comma (,) ; dash (‒), (–), (—), (―) ; ellipsis (...) ; exclamation marks (!, ¡) ; full stop (.) ; hyphen (-), (‐) ; interpunct (·) ; interrobang (‽) ; question marks (?, ¿) ; quotation marks ('), (‘, ’), ('), (“,”), ;     (‹, ›), («, »), (‚, ‘), („, “) ; semicolon (;) ; slash (/) ; space ( ) 

A full stop or period, also called a full point, is the punctuation mark commonly placed at the end of several different types of sentences in English and several other languages. A period consists of a small dot placed at the bottom of a line of text, thus: "."  In typed text, two spaces are generally placed after the full stop, as opposed to one space as after most other punctuation symbols. (Period is an older name than full stop, now used primarily in North America; in other English-speaking countries the newer usage has largely replaced the older.)

It is also used after abbreviations, such as Mr., Dr., Mrs., Ms. (In the UK, titles now tend to be given without a full stop.  In the USA, the older usage is still adhered to.)

The same glyph is very often used, rather than a mid-line point, as a decimal point (or dot) in English-speaking countries. For example:


3.14159


In computing, it is often used as a delimiter, also called "dot", for example in DNS lookups and file names. For example:


www.wikipedia.org



In computer programming, the full stop corresponds to Unicode and ASCII character 46, or 0x2E.



See dot for other dots or periods