Punctuation centuries meant that a standard system of punctuation was urgently required." The introduction of a standard system of punctuation has also been attributed to the Venetian printers Aldus Manutius and his grandson. They have been credited with popularizing the practice of ending sentences with the colon or full stop, inventing the semicolon, making occasional use of parentheses and creating the modern comma by lowering the virgule. By 1566, Aldus Manutius the Younger was able to state that the main object of punctuation was the clarification of syntax. By the 19th century, punctuation in the western world had evolved "to classify
Punctuation 1995. Various sets of characters are referred to as "punctuation" in certain computing situations, many of which are also used to punctuate natural languages. Sometimes non-punctuation in the natural language sense (such as "&" which is not punctuation but is an abbreviation for "and") are included. General Punctuation and Supplemental Punctuation are blocks of Unicode symbols. In regular expressions, the character class codice_1 is defined to consist of the following characters (when operating in ASCII mode): codice_2 Notes Further reading Punctuation Punctuation (formerly sometimes called pointing) is the use of spacing, conventional signs and certain typographical devices as aids to