On Wed, 15 Aug 2012 17:41:20 +1000, Chris Angelico wrote: > On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 5:28 PM, Ian Kelly <ian.g.ke...@gmail.com> > wrote: >> Irrelevant. Why would an author adhering to common principles of style >> ever use square-bracketed dots in a statement that he authored himself? > > You mean exactly the way he did in the post you quoted me as quoting?
That's the usual problem with markup. How do you distinguish markup used as markup from the same characters used as text? English has a bunch of ad-hoc rules like sticking things in quotation marks, square brackets or angle brackets, but no systematic way of escaping markup in general. There's no standard way to distinguish my writing [...] deliberately (as here) from an editor trimming it, except from context, and that is notoriously ambiguous. "Godel, Escher and Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter discusses this sort of quoting, meta-quoting, etc. in detail. A good read if you want your brain stretched to the point it starts leaking out of your ears. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
