NancyLebovitz 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: 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.