Ellipsis

Ellipsis (plural ellipses; from the Ancient Greek: ἔλλειψις, élleipsis, "omission" or "falling short") is a series of dots (typically three, such as "…") that usually indicates an intentional omission of a word, sentence, or whole section from a text without altering its original meaning. Depending on their context and placement in a sentence, ellipses can also indicate an unfinished thought, a leading statement, a slight pause, a mysterious or echoing voice, or a nervous or awkward silence. Aposiopesis is the use of an ellipsis to trail off into silence—for example: "But I thought he was . . ." When placed at the beginning or end of a sentence, the ellipsis can also inspire a feeling of melancholy or longing.

The most common form of an ellipsis is a row of three periods or full stops (. . .) or a precomposed triple-dot glyph (…). The usage of the em dash (—) can overlap the usage of the ellipsis, especially in dialogue. Style guides often have their own rules governing the use of ellipses. For example, the Chicago Manual of Style recommends that an ellipsis be formed by typing three periods, each with a space on both sides.

Ellipsis (linguistics)

In linguistics, ellipsis (from the Greek: ἔλλειψις, élleipsis, "omission") or elliptical construction refers to the omission from a clause of one or more words that are nevertheless understood in the context of the remaining elements. There are numerous distinct types of ellipsis acknowledged in theoretical syntax. This article provides an overview of them. Theoretical accounts of ellipsis can vary greatly depending in part upon whether a constituency-based or a dependency-based theory of syntactic structure is pursued.

Preliminary comments

Varieties of ellipsis have long formed a central explicandum for linguistic theory, since elliptical phenomena seem to be able to shed light on basic questions of form–meaning correspondence: in particular, the usual mechanisms of grasping a meaning from a form seem to be bypassed or supplanted in the interpretation of elliptical structures, ones in which there is meaning without form. In generative linguistics, the term ellipsis has been applied to a range of phenomena in which a perceived interpretation is fuller than that which would be expected based solely on the presence of linguistic forms.

Ellipsis (computer programming)

In computer programming, ellipsis notation (.. or ...) is used to denote ranges, or an unspecified number of arguments. Most programming languages other than Perl6 require the ellipsis to be written as a series of periods; a single (Unicode) ellipsis character cannot be used.

Ranges

In some programming languages (including Ada, Perl, Ruby, Groovy, Haskell, and Pascal), a shortened two-dot ellipsis is used to represent a range of values given two endpoints; for example, to iterate through a list of integers between 1 and 100 inclusive in Perl:

In Ruby the ... operator denotes a half-open range, i.e. that includes the start value but not the end value.

In Rust the ... operator denotes an inclusive range for cases in matches and the .. operator represents a range not including the end value.

Perl overloads the ".." operator in scalar context as a stateful bistable Boolean test, roughly equivalent to "true while x but not yet y", similarly to the "," operator in sed and AWK. In Perl6 an actual Unicode ellipsis character is used to serve as a type of marker in a format string.