RobinZ comments on Open Thread, September, 2010-- part 2 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: NancyLebovitz 17 September 2010 01:44AM

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Comment author: Alicorn 27 September 2010 08:07:12PM *  2 points [-]

On a side note, I'm curious--have you made a deliberate choice to use the UK style of punctuation for quoted words at the end of a sentence (period outside, not inside)? If so, why?

I put punctuation inside quotes only when it is part of the quote. For example, I'll put an exclamation point inside quotes when I note that I sometimes greet people by saying "Hi!". (But then I put a period after that.) I am not conscious of this being a UK thing; it's just how it makes sense to me.

The only thing I can think of is to look for intersections of the set "other people might consider this too private to post" and "I do not consider it so."

Can you give me examples? The ones I've seen in the wild have not had any clear analogues to myself.

Comment author: RobinZ 27 September 2010 08:31:57PM 1 point [-]

I put punctuation inside quotes only when it is part of the quote. For example, I'll put an exclamation point inside quotes when I note that I sometimes greet people by saying "Hi!". (But then I put a period after that.) I am not conscious of this being a UK thing; it's just how it makes sense to me.

I use the same notation, and have seen other people report the same for the same reason.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 28 September 2010 12:34:07AM 1 point [-]

I punctuate the same way, and for the same reason. I suspect it's a geekishness thing.

Comment author: arundelo 28 September 2010 02:57:26AM 4 points [-]

Guy Steele & Eric Raymond (don't know which wrote this part):

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.

Here or here.

(The first link is to the copy on ESR himself's site, but the quotes are messed up.)

Comment author: komponisto 28 September 2010 01:11:16AM 1 point [-]

Me too. The mathematician Paul Halmos was an outspoken defender of this.

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