3 ms·
Apparently quite common among hackers. I remember reading a section about it in ESR's Jargon File ages back that had a great explanation: Consider, for examp
by sgentle 14y ago
Apparently quite common among hackers. I remember reading a section about it in ESR's Jargon File ages back that had a great explanation:
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!
http://catb.org/jargon/html/writing-style.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/writing-style.html
- lmm 14y agoUm, that quoting style is indeed common among hackers, but it has nothing to do with the Oxford comma.
- sgentle 14y agoHa! Oops, my mistake. For some reason when I hear "Oxford comma" I always think comma-inside-the-quote rather than comma-before-the-and. I wonder if there's an equivalent hacker preference and explanation for the comma. Most of the people I know prefer it. Maybe we're all just doing list.join(", ") in our heads, or perhaps it's an instinctive mistrust for ambiguous grammar.
- mrj 14y agoThe phrase you're looking for appears to be "logical punctuation." http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2011/05/the_rise_of_logical_punctuation.html http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2011/05/the...