Vladis I have to say I've always appreciated your well-put (I use hyphens whenever!), thought-out responses on just about everything.
-sb On 1/25/06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Wed, 25 Jan 2006 12:14:51 CST, Kevin Ponds said: > > On 1/25/06, Tim <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Did you mean "grammar"? > > The ? should go inside the quotation marks. > > That's actually debatable, and tends to be an American-only usage. Many tech > writers put the question mark *outside*, specifically to avoid the issue of > disambiguating a ? that belongs to the sentence, versus a ? that's part of a > 8-glyph literal string "grammar?". > > http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/writing-style.html says: > > "Hackers tend to use quotes as balanced delimiters like parentheses, much to > the dismay of American editors. Thus, if "Jim is going" is a phrase, and so > are > "Bill runs" and "Spock groks", then hackers generally prefer to write: "Jim is > going", "Bill runs", and "Spock groks". This is incorrect according to > standard > American usage (which would put the continuation commas and the final period > inside the string quotes); however, it is counter-intuitive to hackers to > mutilate literal strings with characters that don't belong in them. Given the > sorts of examples that can come up in discussions of programming, > American-style quoting can even be grossly misleading. When communicating > command lines or small pieces of code, extra characters can be a real pain in > the neck. > > Consider, for example, a sentence in a vi tutorial that looks like this: > > Then delete a line from the file by typing "dd". > > Standard usage would make this > > Then delete a line from the file by typing "dd." > > but that would be very bad - because the reader would be prone to type the > string d-d-dot, and it happens that in vi(1), dot repeats the last command > accepted. The net result would be to delete two lines! > > The Jargon File follows hackish usage throughout. > > Interestingly, a similar style is now preferred practice in Great Britain, > though the older style (which became established for typographical reasons > having to do with the aesthetics of comma and quotes in typeset text) is still > accepted there. Hart's Rules and the Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors > call the hacker-like style 'new' or 'logical' quoting. This returns British > English to the style many other languages (including Spanish, French, Italian, > Catalan, and German) have been using all along." > > > > _______________________________________________ > Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. > Charter: http://lists.grok.org.uk/full-disclosure-charter.html > Hosted and sponsored by Secunia - http://secunia.com/ > > > _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.grok.org.uk/full-disclosure-charter.html Hosted and sponsored by Secunia - http://secunia.com/
