On Thu, 24 Jun 2010, Kim Cascone wrote:
true, British rules say the "comma", follows the quotations while American rules states the "comma," stays tucked inside same for periods/end of sentences
You know, I didn't really remember which was which : I use the one I use because it's the standard in French. The US invented the other one because it's different from whatever the UK chose. I wouldn't know about how it is here because I don't read the news in English, but I'd guess it's an unequal blend of UK and US style, simply because many other things are. In north-american French, people stick Very Much to the French standard for those rules of punctuation order (but for the rules of punctuation spacing, however, the game is entirely différent).
He was so excited by his discovery of the [foo] external he exclaimed "w00t!." in this case the period follows the exclamation mark inside the quotations but not sure if this is correct...
I would *definitely* write it like :
He was so excited by his discovery of the [foo] external he exclaimed "w00t!".
Because the period ends the whole sentence and not the inside of the quote. You can distinguish whichever punctuation order I pick because it's easy to write down in a recursive parser and happens all over programming languages (though that's really not why I came to prefer it ; that's simply because it's used all over in the French language).
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard, Montréal, Québec. téléphone: +1.514.383.3801