Re^3: For thought: "Perl in the greater context of (me and) the software business

[graff]

Actually, I get the impression from the OP that sundialsvc4 is using something that automatically transforms two (or more?) consecutive spaces into a single space followed by one (or more?) &nbsp; (it must be automatic, because doing it manually is too painful to contemplate). And I wouldn't be surprised if the same mechanism does something about changing line breaks into <p> tags.

I'll just mention that when editing human-readable text in emacs (as I often do when documenting the code I write), I've developed a habit of putting two spaces (not one) between a period and the next word, because if I don't do that, emacs' line-wrap strategy won't allow a line break after that period. It's weird, but there is a traditional "rule of style", dating back to the days of typewriters and fixed-width-font printers, that mandated two spaces at every sentence boundary inside a paragraph.

(Who remembers that cover art for an issue of the Perl Journal, showing the start of a perl installation log on an Underwood typewriter? That one was my all-time favorite.)

[choroba]

You can set sentence-end-double-space to nil to make Emacs forget about double spaces (but using M-a and M-e then gets a bit less convenient because they stop at every period, even after an abbreviation).

[LanX]

> I've developed a habit of putting two spaces (not one) between a period and the next word, because if I don't do that, emacs' line-wrap strategy won't allow a line break after that period.

Wow, I didn't expect to learn something so valuable in this thread!

Thanks a lot! =)