[kelnos]

I think this is a tough one, and different people are going to interpret it differently.

The fact that you put "internal" in quotes suggested to me a mild level of sarcasm or disbelief, i.e, I read your message as "You mean this style guide, published on the internet, for all to see? Clearly that's not 'internal'!"

Either way, to me, "internal style guide" (regardless of any quotes placed around any word) means "style guide that is internal" (that is, the style guide itself is private or unpublished).

But the person you were replying to called it a "style guide for internal c++ code": that word ordering makes it clear that "internal" is describing "c++ projects", and that the internal/external (or unpublished/published or private/public) status of the style guide itself is not being talked about at all.

(As an aside, if the commenter upthread had instead said "internal style guide for c++ code", that could have also meant the same thing, but would have been ambiguous, as it wouldn't have been clear if "internal" was describing "style guide" or "c++ code", or both, even. But "style guide for internal c++ code" is about as unambiguous as you can get.)

[fsckboy]

you are mistaken how English works, how punctuation works, and how context works wrt parsing and semantics. Freighting what I said with your misinterpretations is on you, not me.

what noun cluster would you use for the style guide that google uses internally? Their internal style guide is perfectly accurate. If they publish it externally, does make it no longer their internal style guide? Nope. Would it make somebody exploring the topic wish to add the clarification "oh, their internal and external style guides are one and the same"? Yes.

None of that conflicts with what I wrote, but it does conflict with what you wrote.

[philsnow]

“External internal style guide” vs “internal external style guide”, both could make sense in different contexts.

Like I said, I never wrote c++ there so I’m quite likely misremembering details, but IIRC the published style guide linked to upthread is more or less a snapshot of the previously-unpublished style guide used internally for internal code. It may have some omissions and it’s quite likely out of date.

I’m just amused that this discussion about semantics reminds me so much of the gif linked from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40882247

[fsckboy]

the point is not whether your suggestions also work, but whether "internal style guide" does as I showed in the context as I wrote it. You need to reply to arguments made, not change the subject.

[JasonSage]

> you are mistaken how English works, how punctuation works, and how context works wrt parsing and semantics. Freighting what I said with your misinterpretations is on you, not me.

Uhm, no. I think you've got that completely backwards. Agree entirely with what they said, not at all with your interpretation. I think you're flat-out wrong here.

[fsckboy]

I like how you don't reply to the specifics of what explanatory text I wrote: not replying to the riposte being the last refuge of a scoundrel

and btw, the Hesperus/Phosphorus reference I made many commments ago refers to a famous example of these exact questions in the Philosophy of Language. Read up on it and you may begin to know as much about this as I did before we started.