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Article raises a 21st century grammar question. If a sentence starts with the name of a computer command, and the invocation of the command is all lowercase, d

Article raises a 21st century grammar question. If a sentence starts with the name of a computer command, and the invocation of the command is all lowercase, do you still capitalize the command name? Apparently the author thinks you don't, the man pages thinks you do, and Ken Thompson doesn't believe in capitalization at all.

dllthomas 12y ago
I don't, if the question is forced. I tend to rewrite to avoid the question, though.
- UNIXgod 12y ago
  Ah neural nets though the representation of term rewrite in form of a recursion theory of finite automata with respect to constraint based back-propagation to derive an inductive history rewrite mechanism in retrospect to N v NP depending on the terminal nodes. s/ex/&pression/
kej 12y ago
The consensus seems to be that things like iPhone and eBay get to keep their lower case letter even at the start of a sentence. I'd say grep deserves the same treatment.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  Besides, G/re/p doesn't seem to make sense as an ed command...
fredsted 12y ago
First of all this question isn't all that relevant to the article. Second, it's a question of capitalization methods, not grammar, and more of a style decision than a language rule. Do what you feel is right.
thaumaturgy 12y ago
I don't capitalize command names as a matter of habit, no matter where in a block of text they occur, partly because: root@thaumaturgy:/home/rob# Iptables bash: Iptables: command not found But, I agree that it can look a bit awkward. The usual fix is to use a different font and sometimes a different size or weight for text that's a command or programming idiom, and that's worked out pretty well for me too so far.
wglb 12y ago
No, it should be in lower case and in a different font. This is, I feel, an error in the Bell documentation. When doing the documentation for COHNERENT and Mark Williams C for the Atari ST followed this convention. See page 517 of http://www.nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/doc/coherent/manual/pdf/d.pdf http://www.nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/doc/coherent/manual/pdf... (pdf) for an example in the second paragraph of the 'date' command. (The entire manual is available at http://www.nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/manual.php http://www.nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/manual.php in small pdf sections) Slightly off topic: The manuals for COHERENT and the compiler products were, rather split into 'man' pages like Unix, were organized in a Lexicon. This enabled having one alpabetically-organized manual without separate sections. Thus, for the letter 'C', you can see 'c' as a command, followed by 'C language' as an overview, 'C Preprocessor -- overview', and further on 'calling conventions -- Definition'. This enabled adding much supporting material without exploding the page count.
davidgerard 12y ago
It's an odd new case in English: a proper noun which canonically stays lower-case at all times, not upper-case.

dllthomas 12y ago

I don't, if the question is forced. I tend to rewrite to avoid the question, though.

UNIXgod 12y ago
Ah neural nets though the representation of term rewrite in form of a recursion theory of finite automata with respect to constraint based back-propagation to derive an inductive history rewrite mechanism in retrospect to N v NP depending on the terminal nodes. s/ex/&pression/

kej 12y ago

The consensus seems to be that things like iPhone and eBay get to keep their lower case letter even at the start of a sentence. I'd say grep deserves the same treatment.

dllthomas 12y ago
Besides, G/re/p doesn't seem to make sense as an ed command...

fredsted 12y ago

First of all this question isn't all that relevant to the article. Second, it's a question of capitalization methods, not grammar, and more of a style decision than a language rule. Do what you feel is right.

thaumaturgy 12y ago

I don't capitalize command names as a matter of habit, no matter where in a block of text they occur, partly because: root@thaumaturgy:/home/rob# Iptables bash: Iptables: command not found But, I agree that it can look a bit awkward. The usual fix is to use a different font and sometimes a different size or weight for text that's a command or programming idiom, and that's worked out pretty well for me too so far.

wglb 12y ago

No, it should be in lower case and in a different font. This is, I feel, an error in the Bell documentation. When doing the documentation for COHNERENT and Mark Williams C for the Atari ST followed this convention. See page 517 of http://www.nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/doc/coherent/manual/pdf/d.pdf http://www.nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/doc/coherent/manual/pdf... (pdf) for an example in the second paragraph of the 'date' command. (The entire manual is available at http://www.nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/manual.php http://www.nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/manual.php in small pdf sections) Slightly off topic: The manuals for COHERENT and the compiler products were, rather split into 'man' pages like Unix, were organized in a Lexicon. This enabled having one alpabetically-organized manual without separate sections. Thus, for the letter 'C', you can see 'c' as a command, followed by 'C language' as an overview, 'C Preprocessor -- overview', and further on 'calling conventions -- Definition'. This enabled adding much supporting material without exploding the page count.

davidgerard 12y ago

It's an odd new case in English: a proper noun which canonically stays lower-case at all times, not upper-case.