11 Oct
2011
11 Oct
'11
11:17 a.m.
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' "
Yes, you are absolutely correct. Mea Culpa.
I susepct the secodn one is becuase I always think of 'Oxford' as
'The_Other_Place' to so tm it starts with a consolant. I even once asked
for a return train ticked to 'The Other Place' and got a very odd look...
?
(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
The primary purpose of any piece of writing is to communicate. A
desirable feature (although that is most certainly secondary to
'communication') is that it looks nice on the page.
So yes, follow typesetting conventions where you can, but not if they
obscure or corrupt the meaning. And since technical text (particularly
computer software manuals) often have to use punctuation marks in
non-standard ways, sometimes flowwing typesetting conventions blindly
will make nonsense of the text.
Of coruse it's best to rewrite the text so that it can be printed using
accepted typesettign rules and still has the correct meaning _if you
can_. I suspect that's impossible with some Forth documentation, though :-)
-tony