[lmi] OT: "e.g." punctuation (was: Anomaly in wx-2.9.2 documentation)

[Vadim Zeitlin]

On Thu, 04 Aug 2011 14:37:25 +0000 Greg Chicares <address@hidden> wrote:

GC> AIUI, British usage often eliminates the periods (full stops): e.g., they'd
GC> write "ie". See:
GC>   http://www.york.ac.uk/communications/publications/writing/style-guide/
GC> | ie No full stop afterwards
GC> | eg No full stop after

 I wasn't aware that this was another British vs American difference, I
must admit that I managed to never notice this while reading The Economist
(even though they do use it, see e.g. [0] for a recent example). But while
it's difficult to perform the usual rigorous scientific analysis[1] of the
relative frequencies of "e.g." and "eg" I think the former is much more
common. Personally, even though I reflexively use British spelling for most
of my writing (with some rare exceptions such as avoiding "programme"
because it still feels too strange after programming in Pascal 20+ years
ago), since learning English in school, I was never taught to write it like
this.


GC> In abbreviations you might instead use some funky Unicode letter that
GC> looks like a full stop (eg, U+2024 ONE DOT LEADER), but that's just too
GC> nasty to consider.

 Luckily this won't be needed, Doxygen documentation[2] does mention that
the dot can be escaped, it's just is done in a rather unnatural way by
escaping the space following it, which explains why I didn't manage to find
it by trial and error:

        By default a JavaDoc style documentation block behaves the same way
        as a Qt style documentation block. This is not according the
        JavaDoc specification however, where the first sentence of the
        documentation block is automatically treated as a brief
        description. To enable this behavior you should set
        JAVADOC_AUTOBRIEF to YES in the configuration file. If you enable
        this option and want to put a dot in the middle of a sentence
        without ending it, you should put a backslash and a space after it.


 So I'll just have to do it when I have some to kill (this will take some
time as I'd like to check all the other occurrences of dots in the brief
descriptions too and not just this one).

 Regards,
VZ

[0] http://www.economist.com/node/18527520

[1] Because Google conflates "e.g." and "eg".

[2] http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/docblocks.html