Linguistic debate, was: Re: Sr. Server Engineer (Vintage Systems) etc

Since this thread has gone completely off at a tangent, how about this: Shouldn't the sentence "They were an HP9866 printer, an HP71 and an HP82165 GPIO unit, and an home-made interface" be "They were an HP9866 printer, an HP71 and an HP82165 GPIO unit, and *a* home-made interface " and similarly "a 'Oxford comma' " should be "*an* 'Oxford comma' " ? (since "HP" is pronounced "aitch-pee" (beginning with a vowel sound) and "home-made" begins with a consonant sound). Seriously though, I agree with Tony that sometimes minute details of punctuation, quoting etc can be extremely significant. I spent four years writing installation instructions for Unix software for Ericsson, and during the review of every document, such details were always taken extremely seriously, since it was intended that the reader of the document should be able to reproduce every command exactly as intended, otherwise the installation would fail, or be done incorrectly. Obviously a Unix command line is very sensitive to dots, spaces, upper/lower case etc. Another aspect which I think is important is that documentation which contains spelling errors, bad grammar, bad translations etc reflects badly on a product which may be excellent otherwise. If you can't be bothered to produce correctly spelt, grammatically correct documentation, what is to say that the product itself is any better? /Jonas On Thu, 6 Oct 2011 21:11:03 +0100 (BST), ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) wrote: