Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ames!mailrus!uflorida!umd5!umbc3!rostamia From: rostamia@umbc3.UMD.EDU (Dr. Rouben Rostamian ) Newsgroups: comp.os.vms Subject: Explanation Point! Message-ID: <1076@umbc3.UMD.EDU> Date: 13 Jul 88 14:05:47 GMT Organization: University of Maryland, Baltimore County Lines: 15 I am generally quite satisfied with the literary quality :-) of DEC's manuals, program descriptions, sales pitches, etc. So I was somewhat taken aback when, looking up some input terminator codes for SMG in sys$library:starlet.pas (and in smgdef.pas, too,) I came across, among benign key names such as smg$_k_trm_lowercase_a, smg$k_trm_dollar_sign, the key name smg$k_trm_explanation_point. "Explanation point!" I exclamimed. "This should be a newly invented punctuation mark at DEC world, or a special character created by the mysterious Compose key." Alas, upon further investigation I discovered that an ``Explanation Point'' is somebody's idea at DEC of what his or her grammar teacher used to refer to as an ``exclamation point'' and write thusly "!". Rouben Rostamian rostamia@umbc3.umd.edu