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.
> 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.