Zhanga: August 20, 2006
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You know what? I hate English. The rule about what goes inside double quotation marks and what goes outside is really arbitrary. For example:
I said, "Go to the kitchen and make me a sandwich."
That makes sense. Put the period in the quotes since, well, it's a sentence in quotes. But what about this?
If you don't keep your balance in the cafeteria you may inadverdently "pull a Brasuell."
For something like this, why should the period be inside? Ok, sure, maybe it still makes sense to you. But change it to a question. Why the sudden difference?
If you don't keep your balance in the cafeteria, will you inadverdently "pull a Brasuell"?
Perhaps you can come up with a rationale for that, too. But to me, it's retardedly frustrating.
Ok, near the top of this program code here, I've defined the variable "biggest_idiot_ever" to represent the string "Bush."
People like me (read: nerds) are used to quotes surrounding string literals. So, does the string include the period or not? I really hate it when this happens. This is why technical manuals often don't seem to follow the rules of English. Because the rules are stupid. Well, and because they are written in China.
Maybe one last example, one that I've run into over and over:
To login to this webpage, use the username "george" and the password "chimp."
Ok, one more:
Please open a command prompt and type "ipconfig /all."
Open a command prompt and type "ipconfig /all," then read me the output.
Sorry, did I just rant about something completely worthless? Sorry. I just find myself using up far too many brain cells trying to reword sentences to not end with string literals so I can be grammatically as well as technically correct. Why should this conflict even exist?
10:50AM
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