Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 13:26:15 +0930 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: John Baldwin <jobaldwi@vt.edu> Cc: Narvi <narvi@haldjas.folklore.ee>, FreeBSD Documentation Project <doc@FreeBSD.ORG>, Neil Blakey-Milner <nbm@mithrandr.moria.org> Subject: One or two spaces after period? (was: Style Challenge!) Message-ID: <19991007132615.G78191@freebie.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <199910061522.LAA00619@server.baldwin.cx> References: <Pine.BSF.3.96.991006163638.37031G-100000@haldjas.folklore.ee> <199910061522.LAA00619@server.baldwin.cx>
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On Wednesday, 6 October 1999 at 11:22:33 -0400, John Baldwin wrote:
>
> On 06-Oct-99 Narvi wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, 6 Oct 1999, Neil Blakey-Milner wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> . Two spaces after '.'
>>>
>> No!!!! I can't see why you should even think about this.
>
> That's how formal English specifies sentence endings and is how the
> rest of the documentation is.
Well, it depends on whether it's English or American. English usage
is a single space after a full stop.
On the other hand, there are good reasons for two spaces:
1. It *is* a de facto standard, and de jure in America.
2. Emacs won't recognize the sequence '. ' as an end of sentence.
This breaks the sentence-end macro. It also makes it wrap
incorrectly in some cases.
3. It appears that vi does similar things, at least sometimes.
On the other hand, nobody has put a valid reason for not doing it this
way. True, some languages have different punctuation rules, but that
doesn't affect the way the source looks. And it's simply not true
that printed books have exactly one space after a sentence end; it
varies greatly depending on how they were formatted, but in general
there's more than a single space, very seldom less (and where it's less
it looks terrible IMO).
Greg
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