Home > Archive > Java Help > January 2007 > Whitespace at end of sentence. Was Re: java chat application
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Whitespace at end of sentence. Was Re: java chat application
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| J. David Boyd 2007-01-25, 7:09 pm |
| Andrew Thompson wrote:
> and that each sentence should have two space chars
> at the end.
This is something that my wife and I go around and around one. She
follows the 'new' convention that sentences only need 1 space character
after them.
I'm totally old-school, and always use two.
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| Andrew Thompson wrote:
J. David Boyd wrote:[color=darkred]
> This is something that my wife and I go around and around one. She
> follows the 'new' convention that sentences only need 1 space character
> after them.
>
> I'm totally old-school, and always use two.
Andrew and I just chit-chatted about this in another thread. I am old-school
in formal writing, new-school for email and newsgroups.
Not that I am any sort of exemplar.
- Lew
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| Randolf Richardson 2007-01-28, 4:13 am |
| On Thu, 25 Jan 2007 11:36:06 -0800, J. David Boyd <jdboyd@tampabay.rr.com>
wrote:
> Andrew Thompson wrote:
>
> This is something that my wife and I go around and around one. She
> follows the 'new' convention that sentences only need 1 space character
> after them.
>
> I'm totally old-school, and always use two.
Two spaces at the end of a sentence is a good idea, especially when you
two fragments such as this (note that "B.C." is British Columbia):
"...and welcome to B.C. Michelle, now that you're..."
With two spaces, it's very clear that "Michelle" is the first word in a
different sentence, but with only one space this actually slows down the
reader as they have to take a moment to decide if a comma was omitted.
The job of the writer, in my opinion, is to make reading as easy as
possible for the reader.
The main reason I believe the convention of using just one space started
was due to computers, and stupid word processors that one has to fight
with to stop them from changing two spaces into one. HTML rendering made
it worse too, as nearly all web browsers automatically combine multiple
spaces into one (using " " before the second space is a solution to
this problem).
--
Randolf Richardson - kingpin+nntp@lumbercartel.ca
The Lumber Cartel, local 42 (Canadian branch)
http://www.lumbercartel.ca/
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