A bit pedantic, but a parenthetical can be indicated by em dashes, parentheses, or commas.

https://www.bartleby.com/141/strunk.html (rule 3)

That's fine in isolation, but mixing that inside a comma-separated list is not a good idea.

I agree, but that's a matter of style. It's technically correct. I did say pedantic.

Well, it's technically incorrect in that same way that

  system("echo "Hello, World!"");

is incorrect - it mixes syntax in a ambiguous/incompatible way. It's a bit more amenable to silent autocorrect though, so YMMV.

It's not. There is a C specification that requires quotes to be escaped within strings; there is no such specification for English. One can write English sentences that require arbitrarily distant pieces of context to be parsed correctly (much like perl, where one can write lines which may or may not be comments based on the state of some other part of the program), and such sentences may be unwise, but are by no means incorrect.

system() in general is incorrect, there are much better ways to run other programs, like posix_spawn, fork+exec, libpipeline etc.

For a non-constant argument, sure, but I was talking about the malformed string literal.

Even for a constant argument; it is better to just start the program than to start the shell and tell it to start the program like system() does.

Ack about the string literal.

This phenomena where two nouns are placed side by side is called apposition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apposition#Restrictive_versus_...

So the source of the confusion is that, in English, non-restrictive appositives typically are indicated with commas, but so are lists of conjuncts.

> As written, it sounds like the production assistant is separate from the person.

Of course you are the best judge of what English usage is ambiguous to you, but your suggestion of introducing a comma there is at odds with the convention that you can tell whether a noun following a conjunction is a subject (i e., starting a new independent clause) or an object (ie. the conjunction is bringing together two objects into one collection) by whether it follows a comma. I think your proposed cure is worse than the disease; personally I didn't find lvh's sentence at all difficult to parse.

https://www.grammarly.com/blog/comma-before-and/

>>As written, it sounds like the production assistant is separate from the person.

Interesting, when I first read it I did understand that the production assistant was the person he was talking about. But yes, I can see why it could be confusing.

Thanks, I've edited my comment.

Alternatively:

> there's one other person- a production assistant- and two cats.

Because we're being pedantic, what you'd want is an em dash (—), not a hyphen (-). You would also omit the spaces.

> there's one other person—a production assistant—and two cats.

Or a spaced hyphen ( - ), if you want to stick with ASCII/keyboard characters.

> there's one other person - a production assistant - and two cats.