On 2013-02-02, Stephan Stiller <stephan.stil...@gmail.com> wrote: > And sometimes there is no absorption but simply a hard constraint > against semantic cooccurrence [sic about "oo", which is really the
All of which may be ignored by people with mathematical or programming training! One of the advantages of the demise of copy-editors in scholarly publishing is that there's no longer anybody to interfere with one's logical punctuation. > What I just wrote in my other email > "[...] but (as most people here will know), there it has a > different function." > is actually a punctuation mistake (there is descriptively no room to > maneuver here): with the parenthetical phrase, there is a strong need > for a comma before "there" (though there's a bit of wiggle room wrt But as in many cases where neither option seems quite right, there's a third option that's better than either. Had you marked the parenthesis with commas instead of parens, as would be usual in non-technical writing, there would be no problem. > But everyone is familiar with the much more common case of one wanting > to write "(, " (and space absorption doesn't work here) or ",)" in lists > with a parenthetical element. I wondered how familiar I was, and couldn't come up with an example! Do you have a real-life example? (In non-technical English rather than Englished mathematics.) -- The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
