Serial comma preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution" of certain goods were activities exempted from the general requirement of overtime pay; the question was whether this list included the distribution of the goods, or only the packing of the goods for distribution. The lack of a comma suggested one meaning, while the omission of the conjunction "or" before "packing" and the fact that the "Maine Legislative Drafting Manual" advised against use of the serial comma suggested another. It said "Although authorities on punctuation may differ, when drafting Maine law or rules, don’t use a comma between the penultimate
Comma , , "dòuhào") in China. Since East Asian typography permits commas to join clauses dealing with certain topics or lines of thought, commas may separate subjects and predicates and constructions that would be considered a "comma splice" in English are acceptable and commonly encountered. Korean punctuation uses both commas and interpuncts for lists. In Unicode 5.2.0 "numbers with commas" ( through ) were added to the Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement block for compatibility with the ARIB STD B24 character set. The comma in the Arabic script (used by Arabic, Urdu, and Persian, etc.) is inverted, upside-down: " (), in order to