Does anyone have any thoughts on date formats? E.g. d/m/y vs. m/d/y?
Just use d/m/y as the rest of the world.
Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
291–300 of 393 posts
Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
#292As 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.
No, because you will still need to apply a special case to stop the recursion of putting a period after a period forever. If a sentence ends in a period then what ends the expression that contains the sentence and the period? Answer: another period because you can think of that expression as a sentence too. So you need a special case that says if there are going to be two periods next to each other then terminate the recursion. Similarly your .". asinine suggestion fails since it implicitly invokes a special rule, but is worse than the elegant special rule of just having one period.
Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, I can't believe how much I now realize I want this to be the default. This whole situation feels like the result of a lack of computers unable to automatically place these "ligatures" and I've never considered how we should've ditched this restriction years ago.
What ligature would you propose for "? or "!
You don't need one for those. Even in the American style those are supposed to be placed inside or outside the quotations depending on whether the question/exclamation is part of the quote or not.
Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
#294The article is written by a German who probably learned British English, so in effect this is some guy telling people they should write in the way OP learned to write?
How did this make it to the front page of HN?
Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems wrong because it is. > Question marks and exclamation points have their own rules. > If they apply to the quoted material, they go within the quotation marks. If they apply to the whole sentence, they go outside it https://www.grammarly.com/blog/quotation-marks/
I have seen things like: > The password is ’%>>~|]#^|,’ which is awesome. Which is, as far as I know, correct according to the rules.
I don't think the normal rules of grammar are designed to handle this case. I would probably write something like
> The password, which is awesome, is:
> %>>~|]#^|
This also has the benefit of putting the password on it's own line, which should make life easier for people actually consuming the document.
Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, I can't believe how much I now realize I want this to be the default. This whole situation feels like the result of a lack of computers unable to automatically place these "ligatures" and I've never considered how we should've ditched this restriction years ago.
As I recall, this historically was the standard. In handwriting, the ligature could be and was placed naturally. In professional printing with moveable type, the ligature could be included in the typeset. Only once typewriters were invented and couldn't spare a key for every ligature did the sequential style appear and the British and American styles diverge.
This seems like it ought to be possible on a typewriter -- or at least, one with a true backspace. I'm not sure if the backspace was an advanced/late feature, though. It seems pretty simple, but mechanical parts are pretty fiddly I guess.
Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are so many small differences between English language flavours, it's fascinating. Going off on a tangent, here's a random example... The way brackets/parentheses are referred to in American English vs British English is different. In the US : () = parentheses [] = brackets {} = braces (or curly braces) = angle brackets In the UK : () = brackets (or 'round brackets') [] = square brackets {} = curly brackets = a…
Surely {} = squiggly brackets ?
When writing code by hand I literally just draw mirrored squiggles. (On inspection, only the first stroke at the top reliably indicates direction.)
Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
#298I think the argument for the American style is aesthetics. I don't like it, but I can understand that there are people who prefer what looks better. TFA did not address this at all, which is a pity.
FWIW the British style looks more aesthetically pleasing to me. The American style reminds me of inappropriately mixed brackets: [(]). Cringe.
Oddly, perhaps, I wish programming languages would allow or require mixed brackets when working with open- and/or closed-ended ranges.
Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
#299Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
#300As 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.
I wrote my whole master thesis as you describe. It was logical to me. Then my promotor complained that it's not correct so I had to go through whole 100+ pages to correct all the instances.
/\."\./, /\."/