[Python-Dev] Two spaces or one?

[Talin]

In PEP 9 there's a requirement that PEPs must follow the "emacs 
convention" of 2 spaces after a period. (I didn't know this was an emacs 
convention, I thought it was a convention of people who used typewriters.)

I've tried hard to maintain this textual convention in my own PEPs, even 
though it's very unnatural to me. But I see from looking at the other 
PEPs that that this convention is very inconsistently enforced - some 
have it and some don't. Worse, I've had one person (who apparently 
wasn't aware of the rule) flag my use of extra space after a period as a 
bug in my PEP.

(When I first learned to type, I used one space after a period. Then 
years later, someone convinced me that two spaces was the proper style 
and so I switched to that for a few years. But later I switched back 
because I realized that most modern typographical layout engines seem to 
calculate inter-sentence spacing properly when the number of space 
characters after a period is one. And in HTML [which is how most people 
view PEPs anyway] it doesn't matter since the browser is going to filter 
out the extra space anyway.)

So if we're not going to enforce the rule consistently (and it seems as 
if we're not), can we then just remove it from PEP 9? I'm not saying 
that we should change the rule to one space, I'm suggesting that we just 
drop the requirement and let people use whatever they prefer.

-- Talin