ABSTRACT
Motivation The title of Truss’s (2004) book on punctuation, Eats Shoots and Leaves, could refer to either:
A panda, if the punctuation is as published, or A criminal who refuses to pay his restaurant bill if a comma is added after the
word “eats.”*
Clearly the title of the book is not that of a system or software specification, but this anecdote illustrates that simple punctuation differences can convey a dramatically different message or intent. As has been stated by many, with respect to specifications, “syntax is destiny.”†
Systems have tremendous sensitivity to errors in a requirements specification, design document, or computer code; even a single erroneous character can have severe consequences. In fact, in 1962 a missing hyphen character in a FORTRAN code statement led to the loss of the Mariner 1 spacecraft, the first American probe to Venus (NASA 2012).
