On 14 Feb 2008, at 14:43, Stefan Monnier wrote:
>>
>> without the lexicon, you can achieve 97.7%  accuracy (on English)  
>> using the
>> right regular expressions, and I think  this will be similar for  
>> other
>> languages as well. I think that's good  enough for M-e and M-a.
>
> But the period-single-space vs period-double-space distinction  
> allows us
> to get it right 100% in many more languages than just English.


Do people write like this in other languages?
 From our discussion here today I take it that they don't.  Thus, your  
accuracy may be more like 20% in other languages or even parts of the  
world, assuming that one if five either adopt American conventions or  
find the customization variable.  This will probably work or it won't,  
depending on the particular user.

If my Aquamacs statistics (as attached) are a representative sample,  
about half the Emacs users are located outside the US.  (And I'm  
pretty sure that there is a very strong Japanese population that skews  
this even further).  How many of these commonly use double-spacing?

Do you want users to adapt to the software, or do you want the  
software to provide what is needed to deal with a user's needs?

Consider that variable width fonts are more common now.  I do most  
things using variable-width fonts, including LaTeX editing.  Maybe  
that is why I never bothered with double spacing, even though I quite  
like it in principle.

I'll shut up with this.  Still, should people decide they want a patch  
using the Grefenstette et al. method (or even something more modern),  
I'd be happy to work that out.