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Re: To .jpg or not
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Re: To .jpg or not


  • Subject: Re: To .jpg or not
  • From: Christopher Nebel <email@hidden>
  • Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2004 19:22:09 -0800

On Mar 21, 2004, at 3:39 PM, Michelle Steiner wrote:

On Mar 21, 2004, at 11:34 AM, BJ Terry wrote:

Ironically, I never was able to reconstruct your error, the script always simply failed, or worked for either "test" or "test.jpg". (I dislike situations like this, in which I am unsure whether to put the period inside the quotation marks or not. Inside of the quotation marks it spoils the literal nature of the contained text. Outside, it breaks the convention that periods come before quotation marks.)

When convention interferes with clarity and accuracy, convention goes outside the window.

Besides, it is not a universal convention; the British put the period outside the quotation marks unless a complete sentence is being quoted.

Quoting from the Jargon Dictionary (aka "New Hacker's Dictionary" or "Jargon File", see <http://info.astrian.net/jargon/How_Jargon_Works/ Hacker_Writing_Style.html>):

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 Latin languages (including Spanish, French, Italian, Catalan) have been using all along.


--Chris Nebel
AppleScript Engineering
(who loves the Jargon File and hardly ever passes up an opportunity to quote it. Know your roots, kids!)
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  • Follow-Ups:
    • Re: To .jpg or not
      • From: Bill Cheeseman <email@hidden>
References: 
 >To .jpg or not (From: Carl Anderson <email@hidden>)
 >Re: To .jpg or not (From: BJ Terry <email@hidden>)
 >Re: To .jpg or not (From: Michelle Steiner <email@hidden>)

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