svn commit: r238672 - head/sys/dev/sdhci

Robert Watson rwatson at FreeBSD.org
Sat Jul 28 10:21:38 UTC 2012


On Mon, 23 Jul 2012, Warner Losh wrote:

>>> Never heard about this rule. Sorry.
>>
>>    Actually, English spacing is discouraged in more recent texts; it was 
>> encouraged during the late 19th century up until the late 20th century 
>> according to ye great wikipedia [1], but I've read several other articles 
>> in the past decade that suggest that the English spacing convention be 
>> completely abolished.
>>    FWIW, I'd just follow surrounding style like style(9) suggests. No 
>> reason for fighting over an extra byte per sentence in a source file 
>> (unless you consider how much added bandwidth / disk space those precious 
>> bytes can consume :)...). Thanks, -Garrett
>
> Double spacing is the one true way I learned how to type in school.  Since 
> the 1980's though, things have changed and many advocate single spaces. 
> However, that's for folks with fancy variable pitch font and such.  For 
> fixed-witdh fonts, 2 is still preferred in some circles, including ours.

Source code and terminal windows are probably the last bastions of fixed-width 
fonts, and given the overt use of white space in code styling, I think we can 
expect it to remain that way for the forseeable future.  Maintaining the 
two-space separation helps in a number of ways, not least making it more clear 
when a period (full stop) is used for non-sentence ending punctuation, it's 
not ending a sentence -- e.g., in numbers lists, and even the "E.g.," earlier 
in this sentence. :-)  Perhaps we should add a bit more information on comment 
formatting to style(9) and include this point.

Robert


More information about the svn-src-head mailing list