FFlores wrote:
>
> Roger Mills <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> >Personally I find that use of the dash in French/Spanish books a little
> >confusing, since the quote is not closed.  For ex.,  --XXXXXXX, dijo.
> >YYYYYY -- one doen't immediately know whether YYYY is a continuation of the
> >quote.
>
> Well, it usually *is* closed. I've seen it in all books I've
> read except one (a copy of _Ivanhoe_, if you must know).
>
> Conversely, the use of quotes in English for dialogues is
> quite confusing to read when you're accustomed to em-dashes.
> Especially when someone quotes someone else.
>
> The em-dash as used in English for asides is quite nice, though;
> I've adopted it even in Spanish (we use them more or less like
> that in Sp, but in the manner of parentheses, i. e. in pairs).
>
> The English style of leaving punctuation inside the quotes
> is quite ugly too. "Like this," what's the comma doing in
> there? ;) I read (in the Jargon File, IIRC) that hackers and
> programmers tend to use the "logical style" with the punctuation
> outside the quotes (because they're used to lists of strings
> being like that.
>
Another reason programmers do that, if I understand correctly, is
because when citing examples of code, some dullard will invariably end
up trying to type in your code with the punctuation, and complain that
it doesn't work. I don't like leaving the puncutation inside the quotes,
but my English teacher takes off marks if I don't.

--
Robert