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gramming, 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. |
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Consider, for example, a sentence in a vi tutorial that looks like this: |
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Then delete a line from the file by typing "dd". |
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Standard usage would make this |
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Then delete a line from the file by typing "dd." |
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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! |
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The Jargon File follows hackish usage throughout. |
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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. |
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Another hacker habit is a tendency to distinguish between 'scare' quotes and 'speech' quotes; that is, to use British-style single quotes for marking and reserve American-style double quotes for actual reports of speech or text included from elsewhere. Interestingly, some authorities describe this as correct general usage, but mainstream American English has gone to using double-quotes indiscriminately enough that hacker usage appears marked [and, in fact, I thought this was a personal quirk of mine until I checked with Usenet ESR]. One further permutation that is definitely not standard is a hackish tendency to do marking quotes by using apostrophes (single quotes) in pairs; that is, 'like this'. This is modelled on string and character literal syntax in some programming languages (reinforced by the fact that many character-only terminals display the apostrophe in typewriter style, as a vertical single quote). |
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One quirk that shows up frequently in the email style of Unix hackers in particular is a tendency for some things that are normally all-lowercase (including usernames and the names of commands and C routines) to remain uncapitalized even when they occur at the beginning of sentences. It is clear that, for many hackers, the case of such identifiers becomes a part of their internal representation (the 'spelling') and cannot be overridden without mental effort (an appropriate reflex because Unix and C both distinguish cases and confusing them can lead to lossage). A way of escaping |
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