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Comment by togaen | Hacker News Reader

No, it is needed, because that’s how you know the sentence is complete. The period does not separate sentences, it signals that a sentence is finished. Without the period you don’t know whether the author has completed their thought or not.

For example, as far as I can know, your last sentence might have been intended to be: “In fact, when people are freed from convention in contexts like chat programs, they often drop unneeded bits like trailing periods and any semblance of grammatical decency.”

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By that argument, there would be no sentences in spoken language, since speakers generally do not say "period" or "full stop" at the end of their thoughts. I find your argument unconvincing

This is why we use intonation in spoken language.

We do have a verbal “period” - your voice inflects downward. If you stop talking without the inflection it sounds like you intend to continue your sentence

I noticed my inner voice reading your (and the previous period-lacking comments upthread) in just this way. It makes me slightly uneasy (which is interesting, because while I notice when friends does this in SMS/chat, I don't get that feeling - I even occasionally do it myself).

Not always... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal

Note that placing the period inside the quotation marks creates uncertainty about whether the quoted sentence terminated with a period or not. I understand that classic formal English demands it, but I enjoy the irony that adhering to ‘grammatical decency’ led to reintroducing the same uncertainty about whether that sentence-terminating quote is a fully-quoted sentence, or merely a phrase.

> Without the period you don’t know whether the author has completed their thought or not.

Why does an author publish an unfinished thought? Do you regularily chat with people who send in the middle of their sentences?

I absolutely fucking hate

chatting with people who

do this sort of

stupid thing.

> No, it is needed, because that’s how you know the sentence is complete.

In Ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew, among other languages, people didn’t end sentences with periods. They didn’t even put spaces in between words. You can tell where one word ends and the next begins because you know the words of the language-and, in most languages words contain certain patterns; for example, in English, certain letters almost never occur at the end of a word, which can help you guess word boundaries even if you don’t know a particular word. Likewise, ending of sentences can be inferred from grammatical structures - although, ancient Latin style tends to involve massive run-on sentences, in part because when the end of sentences are not marked, people care less about how long sentences are. Alphabets were around for many centuries before whitespace and punctuation were invented and standardised.

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