Originally Posted by
christep
Lawyers hate commas
Do they? That's news to me. I recall reading about a recent court case that turned on the interpretation of a law, which was decided based on a lack of commas changing the application of a clause.
Originally Posted by
christep
it's there because in the good old days you could ticket coupons with, say, TYO, NYC or LON and the ground transfer between the coterminals wouldn't count. It's one of the many features that were lost in the "enhancement" of e-tickets.
My recollection of the old handwritten paper tickets was that they were physically formatted so that each page was one coupon and contained a source and destination, and the layout was such that the destination of each coupon was the source for the subsequent coupon, and as a result, one coupon had to be "wasted" for ground transport between any two points. Although the fare calculation would use non-terminal-specific codes, such as "NYC" rather than "EWR", so perhaps my recollection is off, and maybe the old paper tickets would also use non-terminal-specific codes?