Re: Spaces after periods

[Random832 <random832@fastmail.com>]

Nikolai Weibull <now@disu.se> writes:
> On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 6:05 PM, John Wiegley <jwiegley@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I almost hate to say this, but I'm not sure this is the English
>> convention anymore. A quick Google shows many, many sites that
>> indicate that the modern convention is now one space, and none that
>> recommend two spaces. I've even changed to one space in my e-mails,
>> even, after being a long holdout for the two space rule.
>
> I haven’t seen a style guide that says anything other than that one
> space is preferred.  However, I thought the general rule was to use
> two spaces to make it easy for software (oh, the continued irony of it
> all) to distinguish sentence-ending periods from other periods.

In Python (where two spaces is also the standard), AIUI the justifi-
cation is typographical: The two-space rule was invented for monospace
fonts, and code (and most default Emacs fonts) is still in monospace
fonts.  To the extent that it's obsolete, the reason it is obsolete is
because proportional fonts are common now and it's not typographically
appropriate for proportional fonts.