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Re: Spaces after periods


From: Nikolai Weibull
Subject: Re: Spaces after periods
Date: Wed, 30 Dec 2015 08:59:31 +0100

On Wed, Dec 30, 2015 at 8:46 AM, Random832 <address@hidden> wrote:
> Nikolai Weibull <address@hidden> writes:
>> On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 6:05 PM, John Wiegley <address@hidden> wrote:
>>> I almost hate to say this, but I'm not sure this is the English
>>> convention anymore. A quick Google shows many, many sites that
>>> indicate that the modern convention is now one space, and none that
>>> recommend two spaces. I've even changed to one space in my e-mails,
>>> even, after being a long holdout for the two space rule.
>>
>> I haven’t seen a style guide that says anything other than that one
>> space is preferred.  However, I thought the general rule was to use
>> two spaces to make it easy for software (oh, the continued irony of it
>> all) to distinguish sentence-ending periods from other periods.
>
> In Python (where two spaces is also the standard), AIUI the justifi-
> cation is typographical: The two-space rule was invented for monospace
> fonts, and code (and most default Emacs fonts) is still in monospace
> fonts.  To the extent that it's obsolete, the reason it is obsolete is
> because proportional fonts are common now and it's not typographically
> appropriate for proportional fonts.

I’m fully aware of the lineage and it extends further back into
history than typewriters – it’s not (solely) a result of monopace
fonts (or, rather, typewriters).  My point was to point out that my
understanding of its continued use was to make it easier for, for
example, Emacs to find sentence-ending periods for, for example,
kill-paragraph.



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