3 ms·
Really you can use semi-colons on a sentence and then end the sentence with a period? And I thought I had learned something during all my years studying linguis
by old_sound 10y ago
Really you can use semi-colons on a sentence and then end the sentence with a period? And I thought I had learned something during all my years studying linguistics and grammar.
BTW, newsflash: many languages use semi-colons inside sentences. Spanish for example, which could be argued to be older than English. So did Erlang copy Knuth, or Erlang actually copied El Cid Campeador? I think Erlang comes from El Cantar del Cid.
- kqr 10y agoI just find it more likely that Knuth continued to use English for those definitions, and not that he switched to Spanish, or for that matter Erlang.
- old_sound 10y agoFor me it's pretty clear he was trying to write the algorithms in Spanish, therefore the semicolons.
- dllthomas 10y agoSemicolon has two uses in English. First, to separate two related sentences in a way weaker than a period. Second, in place of commas separating items in a list where at least one list item contains commas.
- jameshart 10y agoIt's a poor mind that can only conceive of two uses for a punctuation mark. Sure, those are the two conventional uses for semicolons, but it's far from all the ways a semicolon can be used. Try combining it with reported speech; consider deploying it in lists which don't contain commas (like this one); use it to jam together sentence fragments in poetry; use it to notate interruption in a screenplay; use it to make your smileys wink ;)...
- dllthomas 10y agoConventional uses was all I was speaking to. Clarification of that fact omitted for brevity.