371–380 of 393 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 is redundant because the punctuation is mainly there to indicate pausing or transitioning, but the quotes already indicate a change in voice, which is also a pause/transition. To that end, I am struggling to think of a time where the punctuation at the end of a quote really mattered. Even exclamations are less necessary, with the support of the surrounding sentance. Consider; they screamed "stop" to get the attent…
The outside sentence can continue after the quote; the terminating period outside of the quote is necessary if the sentence is ending there.
We know that the quote has ended with the closing quote, and so we can agree on the convention that there is an implied period there, if the quoted material is a complete clause with subject and verb. If it needs some other punctuation like a question mark, then that is explicit.
> He asked me "what time is it?".
The ? ends the question, the . ends the sentence that contains the embedded question.
The enclosing sentence can continue:
> He asked me "what time is it?" but hurriedly walked away as I glanced at my watch.
Now you positively, definitely cannot remove the period after "watch". Why would you remove it if the words "but ... watch" are deleted?
This stuff is simply too important to leave in the hands of people who have never written a compiler.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is the kind of thing that really annoy programmers (because in programming languages, you can never omit things like this), but everyone else is perfectly fine with. As a programmer though, it certainly annoys me!
My newspaper will shorten "United States" to "U.S.", and not add an extra period at the end of a sentence. (Not sure if the spaces are different widths.) When the next word would naturally start with a capital letter it can be difficult to tell whether the sentence ends after the abbreviation, sometimes making for garden-path sentences.
>> There have been some rumblings inside the U.S. Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer said in an interview...
Though I am a programmer, so maybe it is just us...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you're with joombaga, not willhimsa -- right?
I'd tend towards willhinsa and yes, I'd rather switch the question and exclamation marks around in rplst8's examples.
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); h…
I've always written it in "British style" myself because that's what we do in Dutch and I never considered there might be another way to do things, and it wasn't until someone "corrected" me just a few years ago that I even noticed the "American style" exists, in spite of having read countless books and articles which use it. Even now, when reading something I don't really notice unless I pay attention to it. Based o…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always written it in "British style" myself because that's what we do in Dutch and I never considered there might be another way to do things, and it wasn't until someone "corrected" me just a few years ago that I even noticed the "American style" exists, in spite of having read countless books and articles which use it. Even now, when reading something I don't really notice unless I pay attention to it. Based o…
Also, us Dutch get taught British English at school so it makes sense for us even in English.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For simplicity, every sentence should end with a full stop (period). Thus: How are you today?. This is important!. Which clearly demonstrates that ! and ? can appear in the middle of a sentence, just as ; and , can: I want to call to your attention this very important!! point: always checks the return value of your system calls. I do draw the line at introducing scoping operators though it would simplify the grammar.
The dot below ? and ! is the full stop. Thus implying the existence of non-dotted versions for mid-sentence usage.
> Thus implying the existence of non-dotted versions for mid-sentence usage.
Or would they have commas as is used when the : is degrades into the less definitive ;?
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); h…
I've always written it in "British style" myself because that's what we do in Dutch and I never considered there might be another way to do things, and it wasn't until someone "corrected" me just a few years ago that I even noticed the "American style" exists, in spite of having read countless books and articles which use it. Even now, when reading something I don't really notice unless I pay attention to it. Based o…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Not if you are used to the British style. It's not a "used to" thing. The British style introduces white space gaps that don't look good. It's like ending a sentence with a space . > The former must be correct IMHO, "correctness" in the sense of "here's exact the character string that occurred in that other document, and anything else is wrong," is kind of a programmer POV. A looser sense of correctness is perfectl…
> The British style introduces white space gaps that don't look good. Sure they do, to me. The comma you inserted between the end of the quote and the closing quotation mark looks bad to me, because I have a strong expectation of the opposite. That esthetic feeling you have is how 'used to' manifests. Also the US spelling of 'esthetic' is ugly to those expecting 'aesthetic'. I'm sure the British spelling looks preten…
I found this out years ago, and adopted the British style. It makes way more sense and reads better. I'll also put in my two cents here about spaces after a period. I always use two spaces after a sentence and one after an abbreviation. If you only ever use one, there is too much ambiguity around sentences that end with an abbreviation.
Also, I think I will be adopting the double spacing after a sentence.