Fwd: Fwd: [mb-style] [Clean up CSG] Correct punctuation

[Bogdan Butnaru]

On Feb 19, 2008 7:56 PM, David K. Gasaway <dave at gasaway.org> wrote:
 > Bogdan Butnaru wrote:
 > > The primary proposal (IIRC, Brian's) was just to use correct
 > > punctuation in general, including dashes and quotes. Those aren't such
 > > a big deal IMO.
 > >
 > > True, at some point it was mentioned that em dashes would be a good
 > > separator for tempos (or something like that), but that's a distant
 > > secondary issue.
 >
 > The way it progressed was actually the opposite, but that's immaterial.
 > I admit to conflating the two issues, but only because it didn't make
 > much sense to me to examine the two entirely separately.  Otherwise,
 > you end up with arguments like "Well, we just applied it to track titles
 > in general, so why not apply it to CSG?"  (Of course, I do believe that
 > argument has already been made... :)

 You might be right, I don't have the patience to read again the thread
 summary. So, related or not to how it was perceived the first time
 around, I reaffirm that the distinction is important, and that I was
 trying to argue for the former (general punctuation) rather than the
 later (funny characters required in CSG. Although I did at some moment
 argue that the latter wasn't such a bad idea as some though, I didn't
 really argue very strongly that we should use them.)

 And the distinction why I keep those separately is twofold, and very
 important IMO:

 1) Formatting of CS titles is not a general punctuation question, is a
 convention we make for pragmatic purposes.(*) So we can in clean
 conscience pick easy to type conventions.

 2) The concerned punctuation is not very common in titles. This is
 important for all those cost (difficulty) vs. value (correctness)
 discussions we've had. But if we picked, say, the em dash as a tempo
 separator, it would jump from less than 0.1% chance of occurrence in
 titles to something like 50%, which changes disfavourably the "Is it
 worth it" calculations.

 (*: Some parts of CSG are just instances of general punctuation;
 colons and commas for instance mean exactly what they do in general
 punctuation; quotes are often used to set out titles in text. But
 there isn't in general punctuation a rule for separating a string of
 tempos, other than using commas or semicolons. Our use of hyphens or
 dashes is strictly particular to CSG, even though we might take
 inspiration from other CSGs.)

 --
 Bogdan Butnaru — bogdanb at gmail.com
 "I think I am a fallen star, I should wish on myself." – O.



-- 
Bogdan Butnaru — bogdanb at gmail.com
"I think I am a fallen star, I should wish on myself." – O.