Mattel IntelliVision II 5872 Manuel d'utilisateur télécharger pdf (Page 42)

was a personal quirk of mine until I checked with Usenet --ESR]. One

further permutation that is definitely not standard is a hackish

tendency to do marking quotes by using apostrophes (single quotes) in

pairs; that is, 'like this'. This is modelled on string and character

literal syntax in some programming languages (reinforced by the fact

that many character-only terminals display the apostrophe in

typewriter style, as a vertical single quote).

One quirk that shows up frequently in the [120]email style of Unix

hackers in particular is a tendency for some things that are normally

all-lowercase (including usernames and the names of commands and C

routines) to remain uncapitalized even when they occur at the

beginning of sentences. It is clear that, for many hackers, the case

of such identifiers becomes a part of their internal representation

(the `spelling') and cannot be overridden without mental effort (an

appropriate reflex because Unix and C both distinguish cases and

confusing them can lead to [121]lossage). A way of escaping this

dilemma is simply to avoid using these constructions at the beginning

of sentences.

There seems to be a meta-rule behind these nonstandard hackerisms to

the effect that precision of expression is more important than

conformance to traditional rules; where the latter create ambiguity or

lose information they can be discarded without a second thought. It is

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Mattel IntelliVision II 5872 Manuel d'utilisateur Page 42