Ditto whether commas and periods should be moved inside quotes when they are not actually part of the quoted material. When that quoted material is code or some critical literal string, this silly rule, which was actually prompted by typographic considerations of appearance, not only makes little sense but actually breaks things. There is no evidence that writing and/or printing have particularly slowed down the evolution of language. While it is hard to say how quickly pre-historic languages changed and vocabulary changes faster than grammar, all living languages appear to evolve and after around 500 to 1000 years have usually changed so much that the old version is virtually unintelligible to those who do not make it a special item of study. A book I would recommend on this topic is "The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention". Donald -----Original Message----- From: Noel Chiappa [mailto:jnc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2007 10:13 AM To: ietf@xxxxxxxx Cc: jnc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: submitting an ID > From: Edward Lewis <Ed.Lewis@xxxxxxxxxxx> > When I was in school, I was taught to quote multiple paragraphs with > quotes at the start of each and a closing quote only at the end of the > final paragraph. Yeah, but geeks like us love to have their syntactic elements balance, so I suspect most of us prefer the matching quotation marks! :-) (This is probably mostly because of our work with computer languages, where such rules prevail - but also because of our natural love of logic and order! :-) Besides, language isn't static anyway (although the advent of writing, and especially widespread printing, certainly seems to have slowed down the evolution), and "rule"-books for language should really be thought of as being more akin to guide-books. Noel _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf