From: Michael Lorrey (retroman@tpk.net)
Date: Tue Jan 28 1997 - 18:32:12 MST
Omega wrote:
>
> Alexander,
>
> > Another grammatical issue:
> >
> > There is a funny rule in American English, that punctuation marks should be
> > inserted inside the quotation marks, as in: [ I know words "green,"
> > " blue," and "red". ] Here the connections *between* semantic objects
> > "green" "blue" "red" (quotes are parts of these objects!) are somehow
> > put *inside* these objects! This looks like some collective grammatical
> > insanity.
>
> Insanity is certainly the right word. I wouldn't lose any sleep over this
> stuff. All that matters is how effectively we can convey our meaning while
> minimizing the effort of doing so. Word meaning is important, otherwise
> people wind up comparing apples to oranges, but this grammatical idiocy is
> just that. Let's just let the language evolve.
> --
> In the Ecstatic Service of Life -- Omega
I had read somewhere that the reason punctuation was put inside th
quotes was due to a material fragility of early printing presses, that a
punctuation separated by so much space from text would wear out faster
or some such thing.
--
TANSTAAFL!!!
Michael Lorrey
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#!/usr/local/bin/perl-0777---export-a-crypto-system-sig-RC4-3-lines-PERL
@k=unpack('C*',pack('H*',shift));for(@t=@s=0..255){$y=($k[$_%@k]+$s[$x=$_
]+$y)%256;&S}$x=$y=0;for(unpack('C*',<>)){$x++;$y=($s[$x%=256]+$y)%256;
&S;print pack(C,$_^=$s[($s[$x]+$s[$y])%256])}sub S{@s[$x,$y]=@s[$y,$x]}
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