|--==> "APA" == Adrian Aichner <Adrian.Aichner(a)t-online.de&gt; writes: >>>>>>"Stefan" == Stefan Kamphausen <kamphausen(a)novelscience.com&gt; writes: Stefan> -Texinfo (＠node titles), Perl, and Fortran. Stefan> +Texinfo (＠node titles), Perl, Ruby and Fortran. APA> Hi Stefan, APA> please add a comma after Ruby. It is required in English. Adrian, where did you learn English? A comma here is _not_ required. (From someone who's first language is English)

-- Steve Youngs <youngs(a)xemacs.org&gt; spake thusly: >| --==> "APA" == Adrian Aichner <Adrian.Aichner(a)t-online.de&gt; writes: > > >>>>>>"Stefan" == Stefan Kamphausen <kamphausen(a)novelscience.com&gt; > writes: Stefan> -Texinfo (＠node titles), Perl, and Fortran. > Stefan> +Texinfo (＠node titles), Perl, Ruby and Fortran. > > APA> Hi Stefan, > > APA> please add a comma after Ruby. It is required in English. > > Adrian, where did you learn English? A comma here is _not_ > required. (From someone who's first language is English) That's always been my opinion as well, but I decided to look it up. Here's what I found (in "Guide to Grammar and Style" by Jack Lynch <http://newark.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing/>): >>>>> Commas. ... In most house styles[1], the comma is preferred before the last item in a list: "the first, second, and third chapters." (This is known as the serial comma or the Oxford comma.) Leaving it out -- "the first, second and third chapters" -- is a habit picked up from journalism. While it saves a teensy bit of space and effort, omitting the final comma runs the risk of suggesting the last two items (in the example above, the second and third chapters) are some sort of special pair. A famous (and perhaps apocryphal?) dedication makes the danger clear: "To my parents, Ayn Rand and God." [1] House Style: Some questions have no "true" answers, only competing standards used in different places. There are of course differences in spelling and punctuation in various countries, but "house style" refers to the choices about (mostly minor) matters that each publishing house sets on its own. Newspaper publishers, for instance, often use different rules than book publishers do. It's not a question of which is "right" or "wrong"; learn to suit your mechanics to the forum for which you're writing. See Apostrophe, Capitalization, Citation, Commas, Dash, Ellipses, Italics, Numbers, and Punctuation and Spaces. >>>>> In short, for formal writing the comma is preferred rather than required -- particularly if the lack of it creates an ambiguity. In this particular case, it doesn't seems necessary and probably isn't worth worrying about.