Welcome news indeed on The YP front page on May 17 that North Yorkshire Council has seen sense over the inclusion of apostrophes in road signage. Blaming ‘computer says no’ for a dereliction of grammatical duty is sadly symptomatic of an all too pervasive trend to submit to the consequences of inadequate software development. The road signs example may seem trivial, but the problem scales up all the way to the level of the Post Office Horizon scandal .
A further problem arises when the same character has to act both as open and closing single quote marks and as an apostrophe. To overcome such confusions, the idea of ‘escape characters’ was developed. Initially, the ‘slash/solidus’ was typically adopted, later also the ‘backslash’ once the earliest character sets were extended. For example ‘St. Mary’s Walk’ could be stored as data to denote ‘St.