Re: [s-d] Re: [auto] EugeneMeidinger submits p20

[Daniel Lepage <dpl33@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Apr 25, 2005, at 12.09 AM, Joel Uckelman wrote:

> Thus spake pete+bnomic@xxxxxxxxxxxxx:
> > Daniel Lepage <dpl33@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> > > That convention always bugged me. There's no good reason to put the
> > > period before the quotes anymore. Someday I'll want to create a
> > > section whose title includes a period at the end, and I'll have to
> > > include many extra words to do so >:(
> >
> > I tend to just use periods outside quotes anyway, since it's generally
> > clearer. But I work at a place that prints formal things such as
> > wedding invitations, so I have to use the more formal rules there on
> > things like our web site.
>
> Being a logician, the periods-inside-quotes convention has always 
> struck me
> as syntactically wrongheaded, since it creates an unnecessary 
> ambiguity. It
> leaves me with no way to distinguish "foo" from "foo." when they occur 
> at
> the ends of sentences.

Once upon a time there was a reason: periods and commas are the 
smallest and hence weakest tiles on a printing press, so you don't want 
them next to spaces or they're likely to tilt and then break. So 
whenever you can avoid it, you do at all costs.

But now that we don't use printing presses, the convention doesn't make 
much sense. I believe the British have long since stopped doing it, and 
other languages never did it begin with, as far as I know.

--
Wonko

Good-bye. I am leaving because I am bored.
      -George Saunders, last words

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