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Comment by hanbura | Hacker News Reader

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hanbura·

Arguments for British style quotes:

- doesn't mutate the quoted string

- fewer weird edge cases

- encodes more information in same amount of characters (if quote might have ended on punctuation)

- needs fewer rules

Arguments for American style quotes

- It looks more balanced if punctuation marks that use less ink than a quotation mark come before it

I think there is no surprise that hackers prefer the straight-forward way that might look marginally worse

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In the British style what is the rule if the quotation ends in punctuation? Do they include additional punctuation outside the quotation, since presumably the punctuation inside the quotation doesn't count as ending the sentence?

I'm thinking of a sentence like:

> Bill said "I prefer American style."

Would the British write it as follows?

> Bill said "I prefer American style.".

No, we'd write it the first way, even if the quotation ended with punctuation not appropriate to the sentence as a whole: e.g.

> Bill asked "Do you prefer American style?"

even though the sentence, taken as a whole, is a statement rather than a question.

I assume that American-style quotes came about for typographic/aesthetic reasons. I agree that the British approach seems more logical and straightforward overall.

Supposedly it has something to do with typewriters malfunctioning when placing the period or comma outside. Which makes it even more annoying that it is an adopted standard.

I'm not sure I believe about typewriters. It doesn't really make sense to me as the characters are still adjacent to the quotes. So I wouldn't think shifting them would help with jamming the keys.

I do suspect though that it's probably related to aesthetics and/or mechanical issues associated with lead type.

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