Comma (punctuation) Grammar Numbers Diacritic Computer

Punctuation marks
apostrophe (' ) parentheses ( ( ) ), brackets ( [ ] ); ( { } ); ( < > ) colon ( : ) comma ( , ) dash ( ‒ ); ( – ); ( — ); ( ― ) ellipsis ( … ) ( ... ) exclamation mark ( ! ); ( ¡ ! ) full stop/period ( . ) hyphen ( - ); ( ‐ ) interrobang ( ‽ ) question mark ( ? ); ( ¿ ? ) quotation marks ( ‘ ’ ); ( “ ” ); ( ‚ ’ ); ( „ ” ); ( ‚ ‘ ); ( „ “ ); ( ‹ › ); ( « » ); ( › ‹ ); ( » « ); ( 「」 ); ( 『』 ) semicolon ( ; ) slash ( / ) and backslash ( \ ) space ( ) and interpunct ( · )
ampersand ( & ) asterisk ( * ) and asterism ( ⁂ ) dagger ( † ‡) bullet ( •, more ) commercial at ( @ ) number sign ( # ) prime ( ′ ) and double prime (″) tilde ( ~ ) underscore ( _ ) vertical bar / pipe ( \| )

A comma ( , ) is a punctuation mark. It has the same shape as an apostrophe or single quotation mark in many typefaces, but it differs from them in being placed on the baseline of the text.

Some typefaces render it as a small line, slightly curved or straight, some like a small filled-in number 9. It is used in many contexts, principally for separating things. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "comma" comes directly from the Greek komma, which means "something cut off" or "a short clause."

1 Grammar

It is used to mark off separate elements in a sentence, introductory clauses, words in a series, parenthetical phrases, or interjections.

Commas are also used to separate items in lists, and to present large numbers in a more readable form.

These formal uses frequently also indicate a pause in speech. Writers often use optional commas for stylistic reasons, to indicate such a pause where none may be required, grammatically.

The use of a comma before the word "and" in a list of more than two things is called the Oxford comma:

It is so named because its usage is recommended in the style guide of the Oxford University Press.

2 Numbers

In many European languages, commas are used as decimal points. Thus, "1,5 V" means "one and one-half volts." However, commas are never used this way in English, except in South Africa.

Today most publishers with an international audience [1] use the international system writing style. They write the number fifteen million as "15 000 000." The only punctuation mark is the decimal mark -- a period in English text, a comma in all other languages. For example, "twelve thousand fifty-one dollars, seven cents, and half a mill," is written in symbols as "$12 051.070 5" in English text, but "$12 051,070 5" in text of any other language.

Historically, English writers often put commas between each group of three digits. They would write the number fifteen million as "15,000,000." A number with a decimal does not use commas in the fractional portion. Thus, "twelve thousand fifty-one dollars, seven cents, and half a mill" is written in symbols as "$12,051.0705."

Historically, writers in many European languages used exactly the opposite convention. They would write the above quantities something like "15.000.000" and "₣12 051,070 5." [2]

3 Diacritic

As a diacriticA diacritic mark or accent mark is an additional mark added to a basic letter. The word derives from Greek , distinguishing and diacritical is used to mean distinguishing or distinctive. The mark can be added over, under, or through the letter. But not al mark, comma is used in RomanianRomanian Romana is an Eastern Romance language, spoken by about 28 million people, most of them in Romania, Moldova (where it is the official language) and neighbouring countries. Romanian romana Spoken Romania, Moldova, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Serbia, H under s: Ș (ș), and under t: Ț (ț). A cedillaA cedilla is a hook (¸) added under certain consonant letters as a diacritic mark to modify their pronunciation. The tail is the bottom half of a miniature cursive z or Ezh: / . The name "cedilla" is the diminutive of the old Spanish name for zed ceda''. is occasionally used instead (notably in the UnicodeIn computing, Unicode is the international standard whose goal is to provide the means to encode the text of every document people want to store in computers. This includes all scripts still in active use today, many scripts known only by scholars, and sy glyph names), but this is technically incorrect.

Comparatively, some consider the diacritics on the LatvianLatvian also called Lettish is a language spoken by 1. 5 million people primarily by the Latvian population in Latvia, where it is the official language, and secondarily by the non-Latvian population in the same country. Latvian is an inflective language consonants g, k, l, n, and formerly r to be commas as well. While their AdobeAdobe Systems is a computer software company, founded in December 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke after they left Xerox PARC to further develop and commercialize the PostScript page description language, which Apple Computer subsequently licensed glyph names are commas, they are actually cedillas.

4 Computer programming

In computer programming, the comma corresponds to Unicode and ASCII character 44, or 0x002C.

In the C programming language, "," is an operator which evaluates its first argument (which presumably has side-effects) and then returns the value of its second argument. This is useful in "for" statements and macros.

5 References

This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is used under the GFDL.

6 External links

English comma rules

Diacritics Punctuation Typography

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