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English Style Guide
To ensure that the book is as consistent as possible, we outline here the style guide that the book prose observes.
Avoid contractions.
- Don't: Didn't you know that's what it's supposed to do?
- Do: Did you not know that is what it is supposed to do?
Italicise primitive names but don't capitalise them. The added emphasis is to help distinguish the regular English word from the primitive name.
Refer to https://docs.dyalog.com/latest/CheatSheet%20-%20Nomenclature%20-%20Functions%20and%20Operators.pdf for the official names of the glyphs and corresponding primitive functions/operators.
Captions of figures are punctuated.
In chapter titles, section titles, and subsection titles, and other similar situations, we capitalise all words as if it were the title of a book or movie.
When needed, we capitalise all words of a hyphenated word. For example, there is a chapter called “User-Defined Functions”.
For generic ordinal numbers, the book uses “nth” and “ith”, not “n-th”, “Nth”, ”n^\text{th}” (LaTeX).
When referring to menu navigation, use the HTML entity ⇨ (⇨) to indicate successive choices.
When in doubt, the default is to follow the Oxford Style Guide. Remember to always take common sense into account.
In matters of style, it is best to be consistently “wrong” than inconsistently “right”. For example, it would be better to have all titles consistently lower case than some titles in title case (like outlined above) and others in all lower case.