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Comment by benbeltran | Hacker News Reader

Kind of an unrelated question. But the phrase without the text inside the parentheses would be "How to write a Interpreter". Wouldn't "An" be a better choice?

In this case, what is the best option? to be faithful to the original sentence, or to stick to what sounds best with the parentheses inserted?

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I’d try to follow the rule that a sentence should always work without the parenthesis (counting the preceding space as part of the parenthesis). So I would do “an”.

A similar problem comes up with capitalization in sentences beginning with a parenthesis. For example, in this:

(Luckily) Some are already there.

Capitalizing “Some” looks weird, even granted it’s a clumsy construction. But I think it’s probably best to do it that way.

Thanks. I also thought so myself, though it would look and maybe sound awkward with the parentheses, the original phrase should have precedence.

PS. I just read my comment noticed I may have come off as a Grammar Nazi or something like that. It was an honest interest on the rules of composing sentences with parentheses (which I don't know myself).

I don’t think there’s necessarily a hard-and-fast rule about this, and I find sentences sometimes read easier when a/an is set by the immediately following word inside parens, and sometimes when the choice is set by the word after the parens.

I think in this case it's probably best as is...reading the title as 'Lisp syntax' before English.

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