On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 16:23, Steve Schafer wrote:
On Fri, 09 Jul 2010 10:07:06 -0400, brandon s. allbery wrote:
I don't think I've ever seen them *followed* by commas. Preceded, always.
In American English, they're always followed by commas, and preceded by comma, semicolon, dash or left parenthesis, depending on the specific context.
One of the "nice" things about English is that there is often never an "always." See http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/ie-eg-oh-my.aspx for a discussion. (For me personally, I prefer to minimize the juxtapositions of punctuation (e.g. . and ,). As long as there's not an editor looking over my shoulder telling me it's not acceptable, I will continue to do so.) As for future editions of the Haskell Report, one possibility to eliminate concerns about spelling and grammar would be to decide to follow a certain dialect and style. This would reduce the number of comma-related comments. Sean