Paraphrasing of a sentence to comply with English punctuation rules

I have taken the following sentence from the Programming Section of this Forum and have posted it here with a desire that someone will paraphrase it with punctuation marks so that myself being a non-native understand the meaning.

"Using this code the robot is always at .75 and that's outside the range for DCHP on my router so it's guaranteed to always get that unless personally I screw up and accidentally assign it to something else myself."

My interpretation...

IP addresses are of the form A.B.C.D where A,B,C and D represent the 4 bytes of the address. In a local LAN A,B and C are fixed for example 192.168.1 and the last byte is the address of a device on the network. In this case they are talking about something like 192.168.1.75 for the robot. The final byte can be set dynamically by the router with DHCP. Most routers have an option where part of the range is not set by DHCP, so can be fixed and not dynamically assigned. For this user A.B.C.75 is in the range not assigned dynamically so will be remained fixed.

That is not just a punctuation issue...

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Might this help?

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"fourth octet is 75"

When I attempted to translate the referred sentence into my native language (for my pupil), I encountered difficulties and soon discovered that if the sentence would have been punctuated according to English rules, I could translate it easily. This spirit had prompted me to make the post in the Bar Sport Section of the Forum. Thank you for the help.

Just a short question referring to post #5:
Should the last punctuation mark be En dash (--) or Em dash (---) or hyphen (-) as you have placed. As the last part of the sentence intends to clarify something, I would prefer to use Em dash (---)/mdash.
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That's a horrible sentence, but it is, as far as I can tell (my English is pretty good) totally grammatically correct.

A bit of punctuation would help, but it would not be making it go from ungrammatical to OK. It would still be a bad sentence, though it might give a translator less trouble.

It really should be two or three sentences. There should be more clarity in what is being referred to by "it" and words of that kind, the name for which escapes me.

a7

  • in der Kürze liegt die Würze -

Old German saying.

I am a non-native, and I have learnt spoken and written English by practicing the grammatical rules of the language, which is composed of syntax rules, semantics rules, and punctuation rules. In my native language (Bangla), the punctuation marks/rules had been borrowed from English Language about 200 years ago.

For native people, the referred sentence is perfectly alright and there is no need to put explicit punctuation marks as they (the people) naturally apply them during speaking. In writing, as you have mentioned, putting punctuation marks at the appropriate places would bring clarity in the intended meaning of the sentence.

In post #5 @camsysca made the meaning of the sentence very clear to me by putting a semicolon (; ) and a transitional preposition (so).

Sometimes, a writer intentionally makes a long single sentence to force readers scanning the whole write up; else, the reader has the liberty to quit reading after scanning a sentence which is just a tiny part of what the writer has wanted to convey.

I didn't know Shakespeare was German!

a7

Copies were also made in the past. :smile:

To be clear, I'm no gramattical expert - I simply punctuated it "the way it feels right", thinking about the individual sub-elements being communicated and their relationship. I didn't respond to your question about the 'dash' to use, because on my screen, they're all the same one, just repeated different times. My intent, in a document, would be for a longer rather than shorter dash, but that's based on a visual preference, not a 'rule' or 'practice'. Hyphens/dashes have become very confusing in the Internet world, as different fonts, languages, and browsers all seem to have their own solutions.

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