This is why I try to mark things with something besides quotes: like bold, italics, or monospaced (unless it's a quotation in the old sense, something that some

This is why I try to mark things with something besides quotes: like bold, italics, or monospaced (unless it's a quotation in the old sense, something that someone said). In this calculator example, the two versions might have been better in <pre> tags, setting each on its own line, like this: The Sinclair Scientific was able to reduce complexity by using reverse Polish notation, in which mathematical operators come after the numbers they are operating on — for instance: 5 + 4 becomes: 5 4 + --- The U.S. chose its quotation-mark rules for graphical reasons, not logical ones. But the graphical improvement is slight, even debatable. I wonder if my fellow Americans even notice the difference or remember which way is right. In fact, sometimes they look at it askew. One of my Facebook posts drew criticism from my friends, who said it was hard to parse. It was a post about different words, so several were in quotes, intermixed with commas, and I had diligently followed the American style. I have hesitated to adopt quote-punc, just as I write color instead of colour. When a difference is slight, I think it's better to follow convention --- like contributing to source code and using the indentation style already there. But after the Facebook incident and others, including this one, I'm beginning to think the difference isn't slight. Especially in the global melting pot of the Internet, it matters less to follow your own country's convention.