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Date:      Sat, 28 Jul 2012 11:21:37 +0100 (BST)
From:      Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>
Cc:        Alexey Dokuchaev <danfe@freebsd.org>, src-committers@freebsd.org, Garrett Cooper <yanegomi@gmail.com>, svn-src-all@freebsd.org, Gleb Smirnoff <glebius@freebsd.org>, svn-src-head@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: svn commit: r238672 - head/sys/dev/sdhci
Message-ID:  <alpine.BSF.2.00.1207281119330.53430@fledge.watson.org>
In-Reply-To: <523C5041-527B-4DBC-85E1-4AE846B014E6@bsdimp.com>
References:  <201207211407.q6LE7h9P042318@svn.freebsd.org> <20120721153026.GA8640@FreeBSD.org> <20120723071227.GE85230@FreeBSD.org> <CAGH67wR4aug9mF=UDc6w6AuiDyE0LQ7d38ffGDqtWQ_jRt0uKw@mail.gmail.com> <523C5041-527B-4DBC-85E1-4AE846B014E6@bsdimp.com>

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On Mon, 23 Jul 2012, Warner Losh wrote:

>>> Never heard about this rule. Sorry.
>>
>>    Actually, English spacing is discouraged in more recent texts; it was 
>> encouraged during the late 19th century up until the late 20th century 
>> according to ye great wikipedia [1], but I've read several other articles 
>> in the past decade that suggest that the English spacing convention be 
>> completely abolished.
>>    FWIW, I'd just follow surrounding style like style(9) suggests. No 
>> reason for fighting over an extra byte per sentence in a source file 
>> (unless you consider how much added bandwidth / disk space those precious 
>> bytes can consume :)...). Thanks, -Garrett
>
> Double spacing is the one true way I learned how to type in school.  Since 
> the 1980's though, things have changed and many advocate single spaces. 
> However, that's for folks with fancy variable pitch font and such.  For 
> fixed-witdh fonts, 2 is still preferred in some circles, including ours.

Source code and terminal windows are probably the last bastions of fixed-width 
fonts, and given the overt use of white space in code styling, I think we can 
expect it to remain that way for the forseeable future.  Maintaining the 
two-space separation helps in a number of ways, not least making it more clear 
when a period (full stop) is used for non-sentence ending punctuation, it's 
not ending a sentence -- e.g., in numbers lists, and even the "E.g.," earlier 
in this sentence. :-)  Perhaps we should add a bit more information on comment 
formatting to style(9) and include this point.

Robert



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