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| sandman | Saturday 12th of March 2005 02:26:01 PM |
| articles with punctuation signs - i was always thinking that any punctuation sign (almost) is always used with the definite article.
since the 'comma' is always the comma; when you hear 'comma', you have no doubts in what it is and how it looks. and the indefinite article is used in the cases, when there are some variants, such as 'you need a quote here' - a quote can be either single or double, either slant or straight. but i've seen many examples of the usage of either article, so now i'm in perplexity at first i thought articles are meant to mark not the sign itself, but its placement, its usage in some case, i.e. when the exact placement of the sign is not known to the speaker, he uses 'a', and 'the' otherwise (when he's pointing to a concrete place). but it didn't prove to be right. well, some examples: "A comma cannot appear to the right of a decimal character" "It returns a comma in the specified position." "It returns a decimal point in the specified position." "Returns value with a leading dollar sign." "The semicolon is missing after END" "The colon precedes every host variable" "An expression list is a series of expressions separated by a comma." "A dash (-) as an alternative sign" "Enclosing a name in double quotes allows it to contain spaces" i'd appreciate any comments on this | |
