On 7/24/07, Aahz
On Tue, Jul 24, 2007, skip@pobox.com wrote:
I'm with Barry. I still use Emacs. Emacs's paragraph filling algorithm, whether invoked explicitly via M-q or implicitly via auto-wrap mode, distinguishes the usage of periods based on the number of spaces following them. Two or more spaces are used to separate sentences. One space (for example, G. D. Montanaro) following a period is considered a non-breakable space.
I made this argument in private to Talin before he went here for a second opinion. Apparently it wasn't strong enough. :-)
There's no need to invoke Emacs to argue for the superiority of two spaces after each sentence, according to this vi user.
Indeed. After all, we're talking about PEP 9, which is a *plaintext* format. Check out http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0009/ and you'll see that it is rendered in a fixed-width font with line breaks exactly where they are in the source, and the two spaces make a difference for readability. How about in PEP 9 we keep the recommendation, perhaps weakened to "should" or "ought"; but in PEP 12 (the ReST equivalent) we remove it altogether because it doesn't affect the rendering. And let's please not make this into a bikeshed discussion than it already is. -- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)