> 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.
I'm from the UK so the guide is actually unhelpful for me as it introduces what I'd see as bad practices.
Also an ellipses is a special character not 3 full stops, even if they are a good substitute.
- doesn't mutate the quoted string
- fewer weird edge cases
- encodes more information in same amount of characters (if quote might have ended on punctuation)
- needs fewer rules
Arguments for American style quotes
- It looks more balanced if punctuation marks that use less ink than a quotation mark come before it
I think there is no surprise that hackers prefer the straight-forward way that might look marginally worse
I'm thinking of a sentence like:
> Bill said "I prefer American style."
Would the British write it as follows?
> Bill said "I prefer American style.".
> Bill asked "Do you prefer American style?"
even though the sentence, taken as a whole, is a statement rather than a question.
I do suspect though that it's probably related to aesthetics and/or mechanical issues associated with lead type.
I can see why we the old way might look nicer, but the hacker way is simply more precise.
The author has a page explaining the British versus American styles here: http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/british-versus-american-s...
> Mr., Mrs., and Ms. all take periods in American English. In British English, the periods are omitted.
Common British practice omits full stops after any abbreviation (not just these three titles) where the last letter is the same as the last letter of the unabbreviated word: so Dr, Lt, hr aren't followed by full stops but Prof., Capt., sec. are. In fact it's becoming more and more common to omit full stops after abbreviations entirely: this is the Guardian's house style, for example.
> British usage dictates a period between the hours and minutes when writing the time (e.g., 10.30). American usage dictates a colon (e.g., 10:30).
Usage varies, but a colon is far more common with the 24-hour clock (e.g. 15:00 rather than 15.00).
UK:
- Brackets ()
- Curly brackets {}
- Square brackets []
US:
- Parentheses ()
- Curly braces {}
- Square brackets []
What I've ended up doing:
- Parentheses ()
- Braces {}
- Brackets []
It's good to know that, however economic this might look to me, it's still likely to be misunderstood or at least ambiguous even to native speakers.
Most North American editors like their commas and periods inside the raised commas, "like this;" but their colons and semicolons outside. Many British editors prefer to put all punctuation outside, with the milk and the cat.