Re: French group separators

From: Frank da Cruz (fdc@columbia.edu)
Date: Mon Jul 07 2003 - 14:27:29 EDT

  • Next message: Philippe Verdy: "Re: French group separators"

    > Unicode already defines with character properties those punctuations that
    > terminate sentences. Why would you need to recognize sequences of two spaces
    > as meaning an end of sentence??? This would be wrong to select sentenced in
    > a preformated plain-text, even in English...
    >
    Because it has "always" been done that way, e.g. in EMACS, ever since the
    days before we had 50 kinds of spaces and 100 kinds of quotes.

    You don't have to put two spaces after a sentence-ending period unless you
    like how it looks, or you want software such as EMACS and TeX to recognize
    the end of the sentence, which you might care about (e.g. in EMACS) if you
    want to use commands like "erase this sentence" or "jump forward three
    sentences" or "transpose sentences".

    I vaguely recall seeing this same discussion play out some years ago. EMACS
    aside, it's still an interesting question why -- in English at least -- it
    was customary thoughout the 20th century to put two spaces after a period
    when typing. I expect it must have been an aesthetic decision. What else
    could it have been?

    - Frank



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Jul 07 2003 - 15:09:31 EDT