Re: To .jpg or not
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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