Guy Steele & Eric Raymond (don’t know which wrote this part):
Hackers tend to use quotes as balanced delimiters like parentheses, much to
the dismay of American editors. Thus, if “Jim is going” is a phrase, and so
are “Bill runs” and “Spock groks”, then hackers generally prefer to write:
“Jim is going”, “Bill runs”, and “Spock groks”. This is incorrect according
to standard American usage (which would put the continuation commas and the
final period inside the string quotes); however, it is counter-intuitive to
hackers to mutilate literal strings with characters that don’t belong in
them. Given the sorts of examples that can come up in discussions of
programming, American-style quoting can even be grossly misleading. When
communicating command lines or small pieces of code, extra characters can be
a real pain in the neck.
I punctuate the same way, and for the same reason. I suspect it’s a geekishness thing.
Guy Steele & Eric Raymond (don’t know which wrote this part):
Here or here.
(The first link is to the copy on ESR himself’s site, but the quotes are messed up.)
Me too. The mathematician Paul Halmos was an outspoken defender of this.