[Haskell-cafe] Comments on Haskell 2010 Report

[wren ng thornton]

Christopher Done wrote:
> On 10 July 2010 01:22, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic <ivan.miljenovic at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Brandon S Allbery KF8NH <allbery at ece.cmu.edu> writes:
>>
>>> On 7/8/10 22:25 , Alex Stangl wrote:
>>>> 1. I.E. and e.g. should be followed by commas -- unless UK usage
>>>> differs from US standards. (Page 3 and elsewhere, although FFI chapter
>>> I don't think I've ever seen them *followed* by commas.  Preceded,
>>> always.
> 
>>From The Haskell 98 Library Report:
> 
>>  partition takes a predicate and a list and returns a pair of lists: those elements of the argument list that do and do not satisfy the predicate, respectively; i.e., [...]
> 
> I don't think you should bother nitpicking about commas here. As
> Gregory said, anywhere there is "i.e.", you can substitute it for
> "that is". Consider if the spec. was written with "that is" instead of
> "i.e.", would you then criticise where and where not commas are used?
> Does this arbitrary prescription really matter?

This is LaTeX folks! All prescriptivism can be solved by judicious use 
of macros. Honestly, for dealing with all the different journals' style 
guides, stuff like this should be standard fare for mere punctuation 
differences:

     \NeedsTeXFormat{LaTeX2e}
     \ProvidesPackage{latin}[2010/07/09 resolve style disputes]
     \RequirePackage{xspace}

     \newif\if at comma
     \@commatrue
     \DeclareOption{comma}{\@commatrue}
     \DeclareOption{nocomma}{\@commafalse}
     \ProcessOptions

     % According to most style guides we should not italicize common
     % Latin, since it needlessly draws attention to unimportant text.
     % For declarativity we specify this command so that clients can
     % choose to italicize if desired.
     \newcommand{\latin}[1]{#1}

     \newcommand{\.}{% Or choose another name if you please
         \if at comma
             .,\xspace
         \else
             .\,
         \fi
     }

     \newcommand{\Cf}{\latin{Cf}\.}
     \newcommand{\cf}{\latin{cf}\.}
     \newcommand{\Eg}{\latin{E.g}\.}
     \newcommand{\eg}{\latin{e.g}\.}
     \newcommand{\Ie}{\latin{I.e}\.}
     \newcommand{\ie}{\latin{i.e}\.}

-- 
Live well,
~wren