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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> The Sinclair Scientific was able to reduce complexity by using reverse Polish notation, in which mathematical operators come after the numbers they are operating on—for instance, “5 + 4 =” becomes “5 4 +.”

This is a great example of a place where you shouldn't use punc-quote formatting. There is no . key on the calculator, but that's not obvious while you're reading the article.

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> This is a great example of a place where you shouldn't use punc-quote formatting

There's no place where it should be used. It can only introduce ambiguities, never solve any.

Quote-punc, on the other hand, doesn't introduce any. What always drove me nuts in academic writing was the knowledge that no matter how well I chose to format my article, the publisher would always introduce punc-quote and wreck things.

I'd have to defensively write around the potential placement of a punctuation mark which is just insane.

My former boss, a university professor, is a very good writer and leaning towards the anal side when it comes to things like punctuation, wording, spelling, etc. I remember we once worked on a journal article together that was edited somewhere in India. She sent in a pristine source file, and got back a print proof where literally tens of mistakes had been introduced. She corrected them meticulously, sent the corrected version back, and received another proof with another tens of errors introduced.

This went on for quite a while, you can only admire my boss's perseverance. However, what I don't understand is how these mistakes could have been introduced in the first place? It almost felt like someone on the other end was actually retyping all of her writing, or else how was it possible to get all of these mistakes in there?

Was there money involved? Perhaps it was a scam, or a failure to pay the right bribe.

Good call, but no, it was for an Elsevier journal.

So a scam then.

You know I set you up for that joke, right? :)

Yea Elsevier just finds whatever warm (free) body they can to edit.

Elsevier is a mixed bag. They bought up thousands of journals with not that much centralized oversight. They have a long history in publishing but as a subsidiary of an increasingly broad conglomerate (RELX) they sometimes show more interest in exploiting their reputation than maintaining it. That leads to things like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Fake_journals

Disclosure: I formerly worked for MDPI, a rival.

Thanks for this info. In my case, it was a renowned journal though.

Strongly agree. When the rules are bad, don't conform to them. I always use Quote-punc in my own writing if there is any possibility of ambiguity.

I found an old printer's manual a while back. The original typesetting guideline was to put the quote and the period in the same column, one above the other. This evolved to punc-quote on typewriters.

So I blame proportional fonts for their missing ligatures. :-)

Oh this is delightful. Can you share the reference if you have it still?

It is mostly the MLA handbook, https://style.mla.org/punctuation-and-quotation-marks/ and https://style.mla.org/the-placement-of-a-comma-or-period-aft....

I guess I misremembered. The old reference from the 1800's is https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.hx521x&view=1up&s..., he clearly puts the quotes on the outside too.

Not at all surprising, since that's how you would do it in handwriting.

Curious where you found this. I used to hand-set lead type and I don't remember any ligatures that combined quotation marks with periods.

Maybe my monkey programmer brain is broken already from doing syntax parsing all day, but I can never imagine any context where this formatting makes sense. I always place quotation marks "like this". The other way is not even consistent with the conventional parentheses placement (like this).

While I agree with you and refuse to do it the "traditional" way, there is some interesting reading about it here: https://style.mla.org/punctuation-and-quotation-marks/

I think it makes sense to include the punctuation inside the quotes if you are quoting the punctuation, and not if you are not.

That’s what I stick to. If a sentence begins and ends within a quote, the stop is also within the quote. If the sentence starts outside of quotes, I end it outside of quotes, regardless of whether it’s “correct”.

This is what I do. Technical writing should communicate your ideas to the reader as clearly as possible. Sometimes I think people who focus too much on 'correctness' in grammar and such forget writing and language is used to communicate, that's it's primary purpose. If rules leave ambiguity in the intent of the communication, maybe those rules just kind of suck.

But then technically you’d need to add additional punctuation to actually end the outer sentence, “like this!”. I have a firm preference of putting punctuation that does not belong to the quote itself outside of it, and when I want to add punctuation that does belong to the quote inside, I usually work around the problem above by just putting the quote after a colon: “like this!”

The english language is full of idiosyncrasies that don't quite make sense. Punc-quote is the correct "formal" way but informally you're free to do anything you want.

I think that's only necessarily true for the US.

Edit: I mean the punctuation inside of the quotes being traditional.

This is why I try to mark things with something besides quotes: like bold, italics, or monospaced (unless it's a quotation in the old sense, something that someone said). In this calculator example, the two versions might have been better in <pre> tags, setting each on its own line, like this:

The Sinclair Scientific was able to reduce complexity by using reverse Polish notation, in which mathematical operators come after the numbers they are operating on — for instance:

  5 + 4

becomes:

  5 4 +

---

The U.S. chose its quotation-mark rules for graphical reasons, not logical ones. But the graphical improvement is slight, even debatable.

I wonder if my fellow Americans even notice the difference or remember which way is right. In fact, sometimes they look at it askew. One of my Facebook posts drew criticism from my friends, who said it was hard to parse. It was a post about different words, so several were in quotes, intermixed with commas, and I had diligently followed the American style.

I have hesitated to adopt quote-punc, just as I write color instead of colour. When a difference is slight, I think it's better to follow convention --- like contributing to source code and using the indentation style already there.

But after the Facebook incident and others, including this one, I'm beginning to think the difference isn't slight. Especially in the global melting pot of the Internet, it matters less to follow your own country's convention.

> ...you shouldn't use punc-quote formatting...

it seems like this is a really basic idea, but a web search is failing to explain to me what "punc-quote" formatting means. I get that it refers to how a command should be parsed, and how punctuation affects it, but can you give me a link to a formal explanation?

Nothing to do with parsing commands, just with writing sentences in articles (or elsewhere). It’s the difference between having punctuation that is not part of a quote in the quote, like when I said last Tuesday to “not do it like this,” or outside of them, “like this”.

The former is supposedly the “correct” way, at least in English, but you can see from my explanation that I’m absolute against it. I’m sorry, it’s just wrong on so many levels, and whoever invented it were not understanding what they were doing.

It's just how formal US English requires quite a bit of punctuation to be inside the quotes, even if the punctuation isn't being quoted.

https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2011/08/punctuating-aroun...

This rule is obvs not super composable, and leads to a lot of confusion when punctuation (or lack thereof) is part of what you're trying to quote.

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.

— http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/writing-style.html

I would have padded the end of sentence with something else to avoid it or restructured the sentence entirely.

On the HP it's

    5 ENTER 4 +

On the Sinclair it is in fact

    5 + 4 +

because there is no ENTER key — the first ‘+’ is adding 5 to 0.

Odd. So you have to clear first, usually?

Apparently so. I don't have one, but see Ken Shirriff's emulator http://files.righto.com/calculator/sinclair_scientific_simul...

You are correct regarding the formatting, but there is "." key.

No, there is not. See the article, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sinclair_Scientific.jpg

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