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3. A word on style

All the chapters from this here are written by Brian Ward.

Text that looks like this is either something that appears on your screen, a filename, or something that can be directly typed in, such as a command, or options to a command (if you're looking at a plain-text file, it doesn't look any different). Commands and other input are frequently quoted (with ` '), which causes the following classic punctuation problem: if such an item appears at the end of a sentence in quotes, people often type a `.' along with the command, because the American quoting style says to put the period inside of the quotation marks. Even though common sense (and unfortunately, this assumes that the one with the ``common sense'' is used to the so-called American style of quotation) should tell one to strip off the punctuation first, many people simply do not remember, so I will place it outside the quotation marks in such cases. In other words, when indicating that you should type ``make config'' I would write `make config', not `make config.'


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