And the Truth Shall Set You Free

I have often wondered why I don't like to put my punctuation inside of the parenthesis. It haunted me for years why I always felt wrong adhering to a standard I knew to be accepted, yet felt so wrong! And then I found this. And let me tell you...it's like I was seeing for the first time. Now, I don't claim to be a hacker...but this article described a deep understanding in my soul that I had not found words for. An instinct inside that I could not articulate until this article brought it to life. I feel like a new man! Freed of my bondage of bad use of the English language! Life is finally lining up! All is right with the world!

Below are the parts of the article that I am referring to specifically.

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.

Consider, for example, a sentence in a vi tutorial that looks like this:

Then delete a line from the file by typing “dd”.

Standard usage would make this

Then delete a line from the file by typing “dd.”

but that would be very bad — because the reader would be prone to type the string d-d-dot, and it happens that in vi(1), dot repeats the last command accepted. The net result would be to delete two lines!

The Jargon File follows hackish usage throughout.

Interestingly, a similar style is now preferred practice in Great Britain, though the older style (which became established for typographical reasons having to do with the aesthetics of comma and quotes in typeset text) is still accepted there. Hart's Rules and the Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors call the hacker-like style ‘new’ or ‘logical’ quoting. This returns British English to the style many other languages (including Spanish, French, Italian, Catalan, and German) have been using all along.