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0 pointsbowsamic0y ago0 comments

It’s how the bibtex author field is defined. You don’t get free choice here. As far as I’m aware bibtex defines and as the separator

https://bibtex.eu/fields/author/

0 comments

growlNark0y ago

Yea but like... why? Typically you use human language operators to produce readable phrases, and this doesn't even approach readable english.

jameshart0y ago

The person who designed it was solving primarily for lexical sorting of the author field, thought maybe having more than two authors was an edge case, and wanted the two author case to be a logical extension of the single author one?

bowsamicOP0y ago

The answer is probably who knows since we are talking about software from 1985 which was only updated once since 1988 to clarify its licensing

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