Re: Proposal: Standardize to one space after full stops indocumentation, pod, comments, etc.

On 3/21/23 09:50, Karl Williamson wrote:


Sorry for the tardy reply; I've had health issues that have kept me 
mostly AFK

First some general points:

I can see how my initial response might come across as me being a 
spoiled prima donna throwing a tantrum.  And indeed that I had more 
linked-in searches that week than ever before indicates to me that this 
could have occurred to other people.  But I'd like to think that my mind 
doesn't work that way.  It doesn't occur to me that I should get special 
treatment.  When I read that comments would need to be single-spaced, I 
knew I couldn't cope with that.  And that's what I said.  Now it turns 
out that Yves didn't quite mean what he said in the opening lines, and 
that he was referring to tooling reformatting existing text.

We are talking about various things here, and any solution to one may 
very well not be applicable to the others.  There is pod, comments, 
non-comment C language source and perl source.  perl source was not 
really on the agenda, but it has come up in the discussion, so I mention 
it here to mean I'm not addressing it.  When I use the word "code', 
therefore, I'm referring to C language source, excluding comments.

A significant amount of text is NOT prose that can be wrapped at will. 
POD invented verbatim lines to cope with this.  It is an inelegant 
solution that has many shortcomings, but it was simple to implement, and 
no one has yet to implement anything further.  Verbatim lines are to be 
output as-is in monospace font.  This is still the only way to show 
tabular data in general pod.  Regular pod is treated as prose that wraps 
to the output device width.  Verbatim pod when displayed in a too narrow 
window will generally have the display device wrap in mid-word with the 
tail end showing up at the left margin on the next line; and then the 
next input line starts on the line after that.  Such text is hard to 
read, contradicting the point of having documentation at all.  Having a 
test that raises a warning to developers about this allows them to 
decide if the text really has to be that wide, or if it can be 
reformatted to not be.  This porting test is effectively our guarantee 
to our customers that if you have a window that is at least this many 
columns wide, we will strive to write readable documentation.  And there 
are indeed legitimate cases where a wider line is required.  The test 
output can be silenced for them.  But we should make those choices 
deliberately.

80 columns was chosen because that has been a standard width for a long 
time now.  I remain convinced that it is a reasonable choice.  I need 
larger fonts than when I was young.  Few people will escape the same 
fate.  80 is about what fits two adjacent terminal windows in a legible 
font size on a fairly standard size laptop.  On a 31 inch monitor, it is 
3 windows.

Yves is confused about our POD implementation, as he repeats several 
times the falsehood that POD prose is required to fit in 80 columns. 
There is NO restriction on the width input POD prose can be.  The 
restriction is on non-prose.  And it is needed because it is specified 
as verbatim text as I explained above.  If POD were to be enhanced in 
various ways, there would be less need for verbatim text, and this issue 
would come up much less frequently.  For example, often the source of 
too-long verbatim lines is a series of lines of code snippets with 
accompanying comments in a right column.  If POD had tables, these 
snippets could be written using them, and the table would handle the 
wrapping.

I think that this example will prove useful.  Consider these lines:

#if  defined(DEBUGGING)                                                \
  || (defined(USE_LOCALE) && (    defined(USE_THREADS)                  \
                             ||   defined(HAS_IGNORED_LOCALE_CATEGORIES)\
                             ||   defined(USE_POSIX_2008_LOCALE)        \
                             || ! defined(LC_ALL)))


It's clear at a glance that the code will be compiled if either of two 
major conditions is true, but one of the conditions additionally 
requires any of several other conditions (including one complemented 
one). The && is important and prominent, and one of the || constructs is 
also more important than the others, and more prominent than they.

And the order matters.  If the two major conditions were reversed:

#if (defined(USE_LOCALE) && (    defined(USE_THREADS)                  \
                             ||   defined(HAS_IGNORED_LOCALE_CATEGORIES)\
                             ||   defined(USE_POSIX_2008_LOCALE)        \
                             || ! defined(LC_ALL)))                     \
  || defined(DEBUGGING)


it's less legible.  A minor point, but the "defined"s all are vertically 
aligned, and the ! stands out. This makes things slightly faster to skim.

But, putting those lines in embed.fnc and run the tooling transmogrifies 
them to

# if ( ( defined(HAS_IGNORED_LOCALE_CATEGORIES) || !defined(LC_ALL) || \
      defined(USE_POSIX_2008_LOCALE)             || defined(USE_THREADS) 
) && \
      defined(USE_LOCALE) )                       || defined(DEBUGGING)

If this is as clear to you as either of the first two, you're a better 
machine than I.  This change slows down comprehension of what is meant.

This example shows the dangers of tooling.  Fortunately most of the 
conditionals in embed.fnc are fairly simple, but the complex ones are 
now pretty much destroyed.

The project would need to have a robust debate on whether or not to 
subject our C code to a Ctidy utility, which really is what Yves is 
driving towards.  That discussion has not happened.



> TLDR: I do not want anyone to stop hacking on my perl becuase of my 
> proposal, and therefore I withdraw my proposal. My intention is not that 
> anyone should follow /my/ style, but rather to free myself and the rest 
> of the developers on the project from thinking about style at all, by 
> using tooling to enforce /a/ consistent style. The style I proposed is 
> merely the one that I think is the most available (in terms of tooling) 
> and thus the least worst option to follow.  I just want to be able to 
> fix the wrapping on text after it has been search and replaced or 
> otherwise modified with a keypress or a tool. I do not want spend any 
> more time than absolutely necessary thinking about style. Computers were 
> supposed to free us from tedious work, not be the source of new forms of 
> it, and all i want to do is use tools to ensure that we meet the 
> requirements of our tests and broader comprehension requirements.
> 
> On Fri, 17 Mar 2023 at 18:57, Karl Williamson <public@khwilliamson.com 
> <mailto:public@khwilliamson.com>> wrote:
> 
>      On 3/16/23 12:49, demerphq wrote:
>       > TLDR: Single space after a full stop is easier to automate, the
>      current
>       > standard taught in school, and minimally impacts reading
>      speed. Let us
>       > make the standard be one space after a full stop.
>       >
> 
>      The bottom line for me personally, is if this rule were adopted, I
>      would
>      quit the project.
> 
> 
> FWIW. I have mixed feelings about this comment.  The prevailing feeling 
> I have is that you are a very valuable contributor to the project, and 
> someone who I consider a friend, and I would hate that an action of mine 
> was the reason for you to leave the project, so I withdraw the proposal 
> to make a rule about this.
> 
> To repeat, because of what you say here I *withdraw* my rule proposal.
> 
> However there is a secondary level which I feel I should mention. This 
> kind of comment makes me really uncomfortable, as you are essentially 
> saying "unless the project plays by my rules I will walk". My normal 
> response to that kind of statement from /anyone/ would be "ok walk 
> then", just on principle; no person is important enough to the project 
> that they should get to unilaterally set the rules or hold the project 
> hostage to their policy demands, and I personally would do my best to 
> avoid making that kind of statement, and instead would leave it implicit 
> in wording like "Such a policy would strongly discourage my 
> participation in the project" or something to that effect. It expresses 
> the same thing but without the hostage implication that triggers my 
> principled response.
> 
> Regardless, I don't want you to walk, especially not over /this/ so I 
> withdraw the rule proposal. But I really wish that you hadn't said it 
> like that. It sets an ugly precedent >
> 
>      One reason is because of muscle memory.  I have been following the two
>      spaces rule for quite a bit longer than Damian.  It would be hard
>      for me
>      to stop.
> 
> 
> So what stops you from using tooling like Text::Autoformat, or similar 
> to format your comments just like I do? Then you wouldnt have to learn 
> to stop and you would likely save time worrying about how the text is 
> wrapped as well.

Habit certainly, but the vim reformat option that I already know is 
adequate for my purposes, and accommodates easily the many slight 
revisions I tend to go through.  And it sounds like I would like it less 
than the builtin vim version.  And not all comments are prose.  There is 
tabular data, etc.
> 
> Part of my objection to the two space rule is that I dont want to spend 
> time thinking about wrapping prose. I want to use software to wrap my 
> prose. I want to be able to write my text however I like, and then 
> highlight it and hit a key press, and "poof" have it 
> formatted correctly. Or I want to write a search and replace, or a perl 
> -i command and fix up a bunch of things across multiple files, and then 
> be able to easily have the text autowrapped. Especially as we have tests 
> that will fail if POD text is too wide.  Reading text that is all 
> "zig-zaggy" in terms of line length is annoying, having it roughly the 
> same width is a win. Being able to get prose into that format without a 
> lot of effort is really helpful.
> 
> I likely would care much less about this subject if it werent for those 
> tests. If we ditched the POD lines must be so long tests, then I 
> probably would not care about wrapping pod as much as I currently do. 
> But we do have test for line length for POD, and if I rename a constant 
> in our code so it is wider, and that then results in the POD in some 
> prose you wrote starting to fail test I want to be able to highlight it 
> and wrap it and move on.

Then your wish is already granted.  POD prose can be any line width you 
want.  Only the non-prose is tested, as I explained at the beginning.
> 
>      But more importantly, I would lose respect for a project that 
> sought to
>      dictate what's basically an aesthetic issue that has no bearing on the
>      correct functioning of our product.  Timtoady abandoned.
> 
> 
> I dont have an issue with Timtoady. I have an issue with having to tasks 
> manually that should be delegated to software.  I /loathe/ makework.
> 
> Let me illustrate my point here with code style. I do not necessarily 
> want there to be a single style for code in our files. I like my 
> personal style, and in the files I created I like that the file follows 
> my style.  However I know that other folks find my style a little 
> jarring, and I know that their finger memory is different from mine and 
> they find it hard to follow my style.  That is why i go out of my way to 
> put documentation in the Perl code I have contributed to the project for 
> a perltidy recipe that can be used to format the file correctly. I want 
> others that need to work on the file be able to forget our style 
> differences, focus on the problem at hand and use tooling to resolve our 
> differences. So if it were up to me every perl script we have would have 
> a well defined "perltidy definition block", and we would have a tool 
> that autoextracts that definition and formats our files according to its 
> documented rules.
> 
> The point here I am making is that I do not want uniformity, I want 
> tooling that automates these decisions so that I don't have to worry 
> about the rules. I do not want H. Merijn Brand, nor Abigail (both 
> contributors who also have what might called an "esoteric style") to 
> adopt my coding style, I want to use automation so that I don't need to 
> worry about their styles, and so that other folks don't need to worry 
> about my own. For instance recently I worked on Porting/sync-with-cpan. 
> This file contains a mixture of styles, some from Abgail, some from 
> other people. In a single statement or subroutine there are 
> vestigal elements of multiple styles,  for instance function calls where 
> there is a space after the function name and then parenthesized options 
> combined with other function calls where there is no space.  I find that 
> mixture of different styles /incredibly/ jarring, and I am never sure 
> what to do.  The normal rule of thumb from Larry is that people should 
> follow the style of the file.  But that is hard when it is alien to you 
> and there is no tooling to support it.
> 
> All of the above is about code. And luckily perltidy is incredibly 
> powerful and customizable and its author, Steve Hancock, is a great guy 
> who will add features to support different peoples style providing he 
> can figure out a way to do so. Merijn and I both have had patches 
> accepted by him, or features added by him to reflect our style desires. 
> I *wish* there were a tool of similar flexibility and capability for our 
> C code. I tried to find one and basically the options in the C world suck.

I don't understand.  Isn't it the case that one codes in one's own 
style, and the result is transformed into a generic one.  But then the 
original style is lost, and one is stuck forever more with the generic 
one.  I don't see that as a solution unless it's automatically reversible.

That the C options suck indicate this is a hard problem.
> 
>      It is not true that tooling is hard.
> 
> I just don't agree. I tried and it is hard enough that like Damian I 
> decided I don't want to play this game. Reminds me of War Games: "The 
> only way to win is not to play.".
> 
> Autoformatting text so it respects the gamut of human formatting 
> conventions, AND also handles wrapping, and this rule is non-trivial, it 
> is hard. There are loads of edge cases.
> 
>      This pretty much does it:
>               s/\. (*nla: )/.  /g
>      It enforces the two space rule.  Use of \B{sb} matching before the dot
>      and a lookup hash of exceptions would improve the results.
> 
> 
> perl -le'$_="Dr. Who etc. and et. al. is a great show."; s/\. (*nla: )/. 
>    /g; print '
> Dr.  Who etc.  and et.  al.  is a great show.
> 
> Doesn't look great to me. And it doesn't deal with no leaving trailing 
> whitespace at the end of a line.

It is just as easy to ensure two spaces after every period as it is to 
ensure one.  The problem is that that is unacceptable to you.  And I did 
not claim that that bit of code was a complete one.  The hash I 
mentioned would be a dictionary of exceptions, "Dr" would be in it. 
There would be very few words in it longer than 3 characters.
> 
> 
>      I didn't see anyone say that the two spaces is less readable than
>      single.  Rather, the arguments admit the single space has a negative
>      effect but try to minimize that importance.
> 
> No, that isnt correct. The one with a study said that people who were 
> trained to put two spaces after a dot had a faster comprehension. For 
> people who were not trained there was no difference.

That makes sense to me.  It's plausible that people like me have had 
their brain pattern matching capability trained to unconsciously look 
for that distinction and it helps them in their speed.  The untrained 
ones don't have that advantage.

> 
>      So why standardize on
>      something that is less readable (however small you may think it is)
>      when
>      we could easily standardize on something that is more readable
> 
> 
> Because it is not easy.

And why can't the tooling just respect what is already there.  Don't 
narrow 2 spaces to 1.  That leaves only the case where a dot ended a 
line is now in the middle.  But I'm not advocating for tooling; just 
saying if it does happen, most edge cases could be easily handled.
> 
>      The argument that everybody else is doing it are specious.  The 
> links I
>      followed say not doing it is because of the advent of proportional
>      fonts.  They are assuming a WYSIWYG editor.  But I can't imagine using
>      such an editor for writing code or pod.  Those arguments simply are 
> not
>      applicable to our situation.
> 
>      Bringing up "e.g.," and ".t" is also irrelevant as there is no space
>      after any period there.
> 
> 
> Well I mentioned .t because it comes up with automating detecting if 
> somthing is a full stop or not. Perhaps I should have omitted that 
> point, but your claim that "e.g." is irrelevant is just wrong as a 
> simple git grep will show:
> 
> git grep -P 'e\.g\. \w' pod | head -n 10
> pod/perl5004delta.pod:was called as a plain function (e.g. 
> C<Foo::bar()>), not a method
> pod/perl5004delta.pod:(e.g. C<< Foo->bar() >> or C<< $obj->bar() >>).
> pod/perl5004delta.pod:This now works.  (e.g. C<delete @ENV{'PATH', 
> 'MANPATH'}>)
> pod/perl5004delta.pod:a fixed value are now inlined (e.g. C<sub PI () { 
> 3.14159 }>).
> pod/perl5004delta.pod:requested with the ":flock" tag (e.g. C<use Fcntl 
> ':flock'>).
> pod/perl5004delta.pod:were csh (e.g. C<full_csh='/usr/bin/tcsh'>); 
> otherwise, make them all
> pod/perl5005delta.pod:on the operator (e.g. C<CORE::log($x)>) or by 
> declaring the subroutine
> pod/perl5005delta.pod:package, e.g. bless($ref, $p || 'MyPackage');
> pod/perl5005delta.pod:e.g. C<&our()>, or C<Foo::our()>.
> pod/perl5100delta.pod:(e.g. with C<@ISA = @ISA>).
> 
> The cases with POD are great examples of the hidden complexity here that 
> belies your claim this is easy. "e.g. C<&our()>" is a good example. 
> Neither dot in "e.g." is a full stop, and neither should have two spaces 
> after it.

These are all grammatical errors.  Standard usage includes a comma 
immediately after the final dot.  The full correct pod should be 
I<e.g.,>  My claim is not contradicted by these examples.

> 
> 
>      If you recoil at my suggestion of instead enforcing a two-space rule,
>      Why?
> 
> Because I find myself doing search and replace, or manual edits on 
> existing prose all the time such that the text grows and changes and 
> requires rewrapping when I am done. Partly it requires rewrapping 
> because of our POD tests will *fail* if it isnt rewrapped, and partly it 
> requires rewrapping for readability.
> 
> As I said above, I don't want a specific style, I want to be able to 
> automate these updates so that when I finish updating comments or POD 
> docs I can rewrap with software.
> 
> Damian has written "Text::Autoformat" so that you can easily do fairly 
> advanced text wrapping and reformatting activities without having to 
> think about it.  He extended it to handle C comments at my request 
> recently (which works pretty well, although I still owe him detailed 
> feedback on it) and to handle pod directives properly (eg NOT wrapping 
> POD). Text::Autoformat is really nice, it handles outdenting 'NOTE:' 
> type text, and various other task (like rewrapping email content) in a 
> nice way that does a good enough job often enough that I use it for 
> almost all text I do in my text editor. (Not in gmail obviously.)
> 
> If you could point me at a script that wraps or replaces 
> Text::Autoformat that allows me to do what I can currently do and 
> enforces your desired formatting rules then I would be fine with using 
> it. Until then I think I will apply "Timtoady" as you have said here and 
> when I need to reformat paragraphs you wrote with two spaces after 
> periods I will just let the tooling replace it with one space and just 
> Not Feel Guilty About It. For the last while I have been spending time 
> going back through to do the teduous task of adding the double spaces back.

If you had asked, I would have said that was excessive obeisance to the 
existing format.  If you revise comments, you get to choose the style of 
the new portions.

> 
>      The source is easier to read,
> 
> For you. Not for me. I find reading both styles equally easy.
> 
>      and any documentation that gets
>      formatted for output will have the formatter's rules imposed upon it.
>      Proportional font output will have the spacing evened out between 
> words
>      on a line; and the current groff for fixed fonts simply strips off the
>      second space.  (The original nroff did honor them.)  This means
>      there is
>      essentially no effect on users reading documentation.
> 
> 
> Like I said, my concern is the time i need to spend to fix comments and 
> docs. Ideally I would spend as close to 0 time as I can to wrap text. If 
> reducing that time means giving up double spaces after periods then I am 
> fine with that. I do not see any impact from it at all personally.
> 
>      As another example of tools that work: vim has done a fine job of
>      wrapping comment blocks, for decades, without AI.
> 
> 
> Not in my experience.
> 
> 
>      And I have come to believe that code should not be reformatted
>      automatically at all.  I don't think it can be done well enough.
>      (Expanding tabs into the appropriate number of spaces is not really
>      reformatting, and is ok.)
> 
> 
> Aren't you contradicting yourself here? First you say its easy, adn not 
> you say it can't be done well enough. Which is it?

Code is different than comments.  And I was only talking about prose 
comments as being not much harder than a single-space rule.  I am very 
leery of this tooling at all.
> 
>      Part of that is informed by the recent changes to embed.fnc.  The
>      entries are now sorted and grouped better, which is good, but the 
> #if's
>      that I and others so carefully wrote out in such a way as to make it
>      easier to follow the why and wherefore of them, are trashed.  Often,
>      the
>      most important condition has been moved from first to last.
> 
> I'd like a solid example of that. I think in most regards getting the 
> defines right and understanding if you were duplicating a set of defines 
> was a bigger maintenance burdern than anything that happens now.

Example at the beginning of this response
> 
>      This is a
>      big step backwards, making it harder to maintain.
> 
> 
> I dont agree at all. The older code was much harder to maintain when 
> doing something like splitting up a large file like regcomp.c or moving 
> code around between different defines. And the varying ways of writing 
> the list of defines meant that you could have two identical blocks that 
> were created by different people and laid our differently from each 
> other.  Making it more difficult to understand what was happening. And 
> the generated files that were coming from it would pseudorandomly change 
> due to the way tha the clauses were sorted together.
> 
> I think if you have an issue with embed.fnc you should reach out to me 
> privately, or via a separate thread. We can adjust the automation as you 
> wish. But there is no way I will ever agree that we should all just 
> randomly do what we think looks best and end up a bunch of different 
> styles in a jumble with no checking or validation or anything like that.

Like I said, the grouping and sorting of the lines is a big improvement. 
  But the rewriting of the preprocessor directives messes them up a 
great deal.  Fortunately many of the conditionals are simple and come 
out ok, but all the complex ones are very negatively impacted.
> 
>      I write a lot of comments that use vertical alignment to clarify and
>      make things easier to read.  It's just not a good idea to try to 
> second
>      guess how people have formatted their stuff.  I don't object if others
>      want to follow the single space rule for their code; I just am
>      unwilling
>      to be forced to follow their aesthetic, nor have my code automatically
>      formatted to follow it.
> 
> 
> The thing is I often find that when you do this it is NOT easier to 
> read, at least for me, and to make it worse, it is much more costly for 
> me to update the code after you have done thse things. Every time I am 
> forced to make a decision about whether I should just ignore your 
> preferences, or if I should take the time to manually make the code meet 
> what I think are your preferences and the time I spend wondering if I 
> should do this or that to avoid having to think about your expectations. 
> (I have posted patches that replace certain types of code with macros 
> just so that I didnt have to deal with some of your expectations about 
> how to lay out the code when it became mult-line.) I would have no 
> objection to this if it was managed by a tool; I'd just use the tool and 
> be done with it.  But often it requires manual work that IMO I shouldn't 
> have to do.

Agreed.  If you're changing my code, you shouldn't have to concern 
yourself with spacing niceties.  So just don't.
> 
>      The bottom line from a project point of view is that we already are 
> too
>      intrusive in automatic formatting; it can't be done well enough, so we
>      shouldn't add more.  And there really is no need to make single space
>      (or double space) a standard.  Leave it up to the coder.
> 
> 
> I dont agee. I think we should be using automatic formatting on 
> everything. Then everyone is treated equally, we can all learn and get 
> used to whatever the standard is, and most importantly we won't have to 
> spend time on dealing with these questions manually.

As I said, there would have to be a robust conversation about going this 
way.  I am skeptical an acceptable tool can be written without AI.
> 
> Some time back a bunch of people got really riled up when I suggested we 
> change our rules regarding line length. I would much prefer it if we 
> used a 120 or 140 characters per line maximum, instead of the 80 
> character maximum. But the community as a whole said "no we prefer 80 
> columns", and I do my best to live with that decision, and in fact that 
> decision is part of the reason we are having this conversation. 80 
> characters is sufficiently short that I find that almost any edit to 
> existing text results in /some/ of the text going over 80 characters. As 
> such I have invested the time to use tooling to format code and prose to 
> those line limits. I would like to be able to use even more tooling to 
> meet these limits.

Again, only verbatim lines are tested.  Enhancing POD would reduce this 
need, and have many other applicable uses as well.
> 
> 
>      If you were one of those who recoiled at the idea of a two space rule.
>      Again why?
> 
> 
> Because of the dearth of tooling that allows me to automate the task of 
> laying out text in comments and pod blocks to satisfy it.
> 
> We have tests that nag me if my POD lines are too long. POD does not 
> actually care how long lines are, and I certainly wouldn't willingly 
> inflict a 80 column rule on myself if I could avoid it. So I want to be 
> able to edit POD (and comments) and just hit the "reformat text" key in 
> my editor and have it pass the tests and be reasonably readable. I do 
> NOT want to waste my time with such matters, I want to automate it away. 
> If I could reliably automate your style I would and we wouldnt be having 
> this conversation, but as has been stated elsewhere (including by you), 
> some types of formatting are "automation unfriendly", and teaching 
> humans is easier than teaching computers.

Again, you are misstating the situation.  As I said at the beginning, 
those tests aren't there for no good reason.  They are there to make 
sure we give readable output to our customers.
> 
> 
>      I believe I demonstrated it was better than the one space
>      one.
> 
> I dont think you did. The studies out there show that people who 
> *expect* the two spaces read less well without it. For those who do not 
> have that expectation there is no difference. And the difference is 
> extremely minor even when it is apparent. It is very grey area as to 
> whether it makes a difference really.
> 
>      So why would you recoil?  My guess is it would be that you
>      wouldn't want to have my aesthetic imposed on you,
> 
> No, that isn't correct. If there was tooling that automated your style 
> which I could use then I would use it and presumably we wouldn't be 
> having this conversation. There isn't and I suspect the reason there 
> isn't is because it is a harder problem than you admit.
> 
>   > but have no problem imposing yours on me.
> 
> Characterizing it as "my style" is not fair. I actually *would* prefer 
> if all of our comments and docs used the double space after a full stop 
> model, as I said in my original post I also come from the time period 
> where that was the standard. The only reason I want to standardize it to 
> a single space is that there are no good tools to help me achieve that 
> style, and there is a large group of people younger than me who don't 
> think the rule exists at all so I want to make them feel comfortable as 
> well.
> 
> BTW, as I recall you were one of the people who favoured an 80 column 
> limit for our code when I was asking for something wider. Why was 
> imposing that expectation on me ok, but me suggesting this not ok?
> 
> The advantage of having a standardized set of tooling which manages 
> formatting is that it side-steps these kinds of discussions. I don't get 
> everything I want (140 column text), and you dont everything you want 
> (two spaces after a full stop), but most importantly we don't argue 
> about who gets what they want, it comes down to what the tool does or 
> can do.  I dont want you to have to manually follow /my/ style, and I 
> dont want to have to manually follow /your/ style. I just want to be 
> able to use a tool so that I dont have to worry about style at all and 
> leave it up to tooling instead. If that means I don't get every one of 
> my preferences respected it still is a big win for me and the project 
> because /nobody has to to think about it/.  If you gave me a tool that 
> formatted stuff the way you liked, and the rest of the community agreed 
> we should use it then I would be happy to use it.
> 
>      That's not perly.  But it's best to not have such
>      a picayune rule at all.
> 
> 
> Sure, but if we go that way then I reserve the right to reformat any 
> text I feel necessary to reformat in my style without feeling guilty at 
> all. I just wanted a rule about this so that it was clear that it is not 
> an error to replace two spaces after a period with one space if I need 
> to. It seems that not having a rule has the same outcome, so then I am 
> happy I guess. I would prefer that we came to a consensus that using 
> specific tooling to enforce whatever conventions we want to follow is 
> better than expecting everyone to follow each other's style manually. 
> Going back to code now, my experience is that outside of one developer I 
> have worked most people do have a consistent style even if they think 
> they do. I know from running perltidy on my own code that I often 
> violate my own preferences in minor and subtle ways.
> 
> Yves
> 
> 

• Proposal: Standardize to one space after full stops indocumentation, pod, comments, etc. by demerphq
• Re: Proposal: Standardize to one space after full stops indocumentation, pod, comments, etc. by Ovid
• Re: Proposal: Standardize to one space after full stops indocumentation, pod, comments, etc. by Damian Conway
• Re: Proposal: Standardize to one space after full stops indocumentation, pod, comments, etc. by Elvin Aslanov
• Re: Proposal: Standardize to one space after full stops indocumentation, pod, comments, etc. by Christian Walde
• Re: Proposal: Standardize to one space after full stops indocumentation, pod, comments, etc. by demerphq
• Re: Proposal: Standardize to one space after full stops indocumentation, pod, comments, etc. by Christian Walde
• Re: Proposal: Standardize to one space after full stops indocumentation, pod, comments, etc. by Karl Williamson
• Re: Proposal: Standardize to one space after full stops indocumentation, pod, comments, etc. by Karl Williamson
• Re: Proposal: Standardize to one space after full stops indocumentation, pod, comments, etc. by Karl Williamson
• Re: Proposal: Standardize to one space after full stops indocumentation, pod, comments, etc. by demerphq
• Re: Proposal: Standardize to one space after full stops indocumentation, pod, comments, etc. by Ovid
• Re: Proposal: Standardize to one space after full stops indocumentation, pod, comments, etc. by demerphq
• Re: Proposal: Standardize to one space after full stops indocumentation, pod, comments, etc. by Ricardo Signes
• Re: Proposal: Standardize to one space after full stops indocumentation, pod, comments, etc. by perl5
• Re: Proposal: Standardize to one space after full stops indocumentation, pod, comments, etc. by Oodler 577 via perl5-porters
• Re: Proposal: Standardize to one space after full stops indocumentation, pod, comments, etc. by Wesley via perl5-porters
• Re: Proposal: Standardize to one space after full stops indocumentation, pod, comments, etc. by "G.W. Haywood" via perl5-porters