161–170 of 393 posts
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> for the American style is aesthetics Why would you make a style choice to make something less aesthetically pleasing?
I wouldn't and I don't think I am. The American style is not aesthetically pleasing at all. I think you misread my comment or replied to me accidentally.
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I don't see why it is redundant. There is no reason to assume that the quoted sentence ends the quoting sentence. Imagine this being the last thing you see on a page. Without turning the page, there would be no way of knowing whether the quoting sentence is complete. But these things are just conventions. It's futile to demand any kind of logic or consistency.
It's not the only element of style that may seem illogical, there are many more. Off the top of my head: * Nested parentheses. (In theory, you could use any level needed (provided that they make sense), but in practice, they're scoffed at.) It is similar with quotes, for the same reasons: limited readability - although here you can at least juggle with single, double and French quotes, depending on the language and s…
This would not convey the correct meaning: She said, "I can't do that!"
This looks incorrect: She said, "I can't do that"!
This looks incorrect as well: She said, "I can't do that."!
As a programmer, I’d prefer a combination of the two: Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus.”. as I think it’s weird that a punctuation mark inside a quote can end the sentence that contains the quote. I’d argue like this: in the above case there are two sentences, the quote and the sentence that contains the quote. Both need to be terminated with a period.
This looks completely bizarre to me. I hope this never becomes a standard.
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Not quite, in practice you still occasionally stumble upon situations like these: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51974631/how-do-i-proper... Or this: https://github.com/spaceghoul/json_deep_parse#example-usage-...
I see what you mean, but the first appears to be a PHP bug (unless I am misreading?). The second, appears to be a tool for parsing a json blob which has been escaped and encoded as a simple string inside another json blob. That's certainly an interesting problem, and one that is likely to come up in a sufficiently complicated world - however it's not an issue with parsing JSON. It's an issue with parsing /any/ data s…
Except for a data format which would allow embedding data in a nested fashion without altering it in any way. For example:
some_object_field: "some value"
some_other_field:
with_sub_objects:
and_sub_fields: "with values"
and_also_fields:
"""
which_allow_objects:
embedded_as_strings: "without transforming the structure"
which_both: "JSON and XML"
have_somewhat: "failed to do"
#""" control sequences should also be valid in the body, as long as there is proper indentation, a la Python
# which could then be simply stripped for display, for example, based on the first """ having N indentation
# then it would follow that the rest of the data entries have N+TAB_WIDTH, which could be simply stripped
# also, processing the beginning of every line would be less expensive than iterating through the entire line in search of escaped \n or anything of the sort
"""
As a consequence, the amount of parsing and processing that you need to do is really bad for performance. Of course, there are formats like YAML and TOML that go in the opposite direction - they try to cover all use cases and end up being overcomplicated.
There are occasionally other attempts like JSON5 to improve things: https://json5.org/
However those also oftentimes are not very popular, because there is just too much ecosystem that has been built around the older formats, like XML, JSON and even YAML.
If you were surprised that someone calmly said, "I can't do that," how would you write it? This would not convey the correct meaning: She said, "I can't do that!" This looks incorrect: She said, "I can't do that"! This looks incorrect as well: She said, "I can't do that."!
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> It’s a shame that the punctuation of human languages can’t be logical. s/the punctuation of //
Lojban is a human language, even if it is not a natural language.
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> I do not understand why OP decided to use "English" which implies that people in Scotland and Northern Ireland might punctuate differently. Not sure about the author, but for several countries "English" is colloqualy used as a stand-in for British in general (and England for the UK), as those were the British they most commonly met.
It's best not to though, unless you want to annoy people from Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Most English people will consider it a sign of ignorance too. Beyond that, the "colloquial" use is simply incorrect.
Doesn't matter, language follows use, not etymology or geography. If a term has been established as something (in actual use) then it will be used, doesn't matter if it's not technically correct (same way "Indians" was used for centuries for Native Americans, and only fell out of use because of political concerns, not because it was also obviously incorrect and based on a misunderstanding of a whole continent).
As a programmer, I’d prefer a combination of the two: Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus.”. as I think it’s weird that a punctuation mark inside a quote can end the sentence that contains the quote. I’d argue like this: in the above case there are two sentences, the quote and the sentence that contains the quote. Both need to be terminated with a period.
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OK, but why? Is this a convention?
It looks better and it saves space.
It does save space, but I'd say that's neither here nor there. It isn't like space for an extra period at the end of a sentence was ever at a premium.
At best, for a whole 200+ page book, you'd save a page or so.