Full Disclosure mailing list archives
Re: [OT] Re: can a brother get some disclosure?
From: Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu
Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2006 13:47:06 -0500
On Wed, 25 Jan 2006 12:14:51 CST, Kevin Ponds said:
On 1/25/06, Tim <tim-security () sentinelchicken org> 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."
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Current thread:
- can a brother get some disclosure? PCSC Information Services (Jan 24)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- RE: can a brother get some disclosure? Edward Pearson (Jan 25)
- [OT] Re: can a brother get some disclosure? Tim (Jan 25)
- Re: [OT] Re: can a brother get some disclosure? Kevin Ponds (Jan 25)
- RE: [OT] Re: can a brother get some disclosure? Scott Schappert (Jan 25)
- Re: [OT] Re: can a brother get some disclosure? Valdis . Kletnieks (Jan 25)
- Re: [OT] Re: can a brother get some disclosure? c0ntex (Jan 25)
- Re: [OT] Re: can a brother get some disclosure? Kevin Ponds (Jan 25)
- RE: [OT] Re: can a brother get some disclosure? Scott Schappert (Jan 26)
- [OT] Re: can a brother get some disclosure? Tim (Jan 25)
- Re: [OT] Re: can a brother get some disclosure? Stan Bubrouski (Jan 26)