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One sentence per line, please

rhodesmill.org

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Re: One sentence per line, please

#11

Post by cpeterso »

CJefferson wrote: post #3

Or, you can use a diff command which understands word diffs. git has '--word-diff', svn unfortunatly doesn't have such an option, but ' http://www.sable.mcgill.ca/~cpicke/swd/ provides a nice script (there are others). Don't know about mercurial. I hate working with authors who try to force line breaks into text unnaturally. I have heard many justifications for it over the years, but I find it hard to understand why…

I find myself adapting my coding style in order to produce prettier diffs (for code reviewers). For example, I may insert extra vertical whitespace or place a new function's definition where it won't be melded with unrelated diff chunks.

I've played around with Bram Cohen's "patience" diff algorithm, but I can only remember a couple times when it produced a better diff.

Re: One sentence per line, please

#12

Post by mturmon »

duskwuff wrote: post #8
jmmcd wrote: post #7

This is a topic that has often bothered me when collaborating with people on writing latex. I use Emacs with auto-fill-mode and Meta-Q to fill paragraphs. This usually works out ok in my own files because usually a re-fill of existing text only affects a few lines. When other people get involved, diffs and merges are ruined, as the article says. But the article's solution sounds like a lot of work. Do I have to manua…

> Do I have to manually break lines that get longer than 80 characters (or whatever my limit is)? Am I supposed to turn soft word wrap on? In most situations, there should be some sort of semantic break in your sentences every 80 characters or less. (It may not be demarcated with a comma.) If there isn't, you may want to consider reworking those sentences for clarity.

Yes. When writing LaTeX, I put line breaks in after phrases and clauses, as well as at every sentence end. I'm following exactly Kernighan's advice from old nroff documentation.

As a result, my text is very ragged right. I don't even notice it because I'm concentrating on meaning, not form.

Re: One sentence per line, please

#14

Post by lutusp »

> One sentence per line, please

I beg to differ: One paragraph per line, please. The natural lexical unit is not the sentence, but the paragraph. These three sentences belong together as a unit, and should be separated from other paragraphs by a double linefeed.

If someone wants to later break paragraphs into separate sentences for some reason, it's child's play, and that option is implicit in this formatting. But if someone wants to reassemble individual sentences into paragraphs, as anyone knows who has tried to reassemble lines into paragraphs (as with an e-mail in its delivered form), it's nearly impossible to get right.

Complete thoughts reside in paragraphs, groupings of sentences, not in the sentences. One paragraph per line, please.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dont_use_line_breaks

A quote: "Do not use manually entered hard line breaks within paragraphs when editing articles."

A long list of justifications follows in the article.

Re: One sentence per line, please

#15

Post by Camillo »

This clown doesn't even know what a sentence is. In his first example, he has 1/5 sentences per line. Then he changes it to 1/7 sentences per line, i.e. he moves away from his supposed "one sentence per line" target. Yes, in the text of the article he admits that maybe he was thinking about clauses, but I have a zero tolerance policy towards objectively wrong titles.

And of course, the real solution to the problem of "fussing with the lines of each paragraph so that they all end near the right margin" is to use a text editor that soft-wraps lines. Yes, computers have recently become powerful enough to make that possible while editing the document! Amazing.

Re: One sentence per line, please

#16

Post by jdp »

Camillo wrote: post #15

This clown doesn't even know what a sentence is. In his first example, he has 1/5 sentences per line. Then he changes it to 1/7 sentences per line, i.e. he moves away from his supposed "one sentence per line" target. Yes, in the text of the article he admits that maybe he was thinking about clauses, but I have a zero tolerance policy towards objectively wrong titles. And of course, the real solution to the problem of…

The title is One sentence per line, but he clarifies to include clauses in the body of the article. This also has nothing to do with where the margin ends, but editing text in developer formats that is later transformed to end-user formats in a way that gels well with the tools of the Unix environment. Your comment is unnecessarily venomous and not representative of the contents of the article.

Re: One sentence per line, please

#17

Post by Camillo »

jdp wrote: post #16
Camillo wrote: post #15

This clown doesn't even know what a sentence is. In his first example, he has 1/5 sentences per line. Then he changes it to 1/7 sentences per line, i.e. he moves away from his supposed "one sentence per line" target. Yes, in the text of the article he admits that maybe he was thinking about clauses, but I have a zero tolerance policy towards objectively wrong titles. And of course, the real solution to the problem of…

The title is One sentence per line , but he clarifies to include clauses in the body of the article. This also has nothing to do with where the margin ends, but editing text in developer formats that is later transformed to end-user formats in a way that gels well with the tools of the Unix environment. Your comment is unnecessarily venomous and not representative of the contents of the article.

Have you noticed how Github helpfully shows which words have changed inside a line when looking at diffs? If we stop teaching people to bend over backwards to accomodate 70s technology, maybe we'll have more young hackers fixing our tools.

Re: One sentence per line, please

#18

Post by cperciva »

FreeBSD has a strict rule that each sentence should always begin a new line. The reason isn't so much to simplify editing (not relevant with modern editors) or to make diffs more compact (size hardly matters); rather, the biggest reason is to make "svn blame" work better.

Re: One sentence per line, please

#19

Post by jmmcd »

Camillo wrote: post #17
jdp wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The title is One sentence per line , but he clarifies to include clauses in the body of the article. This also has nothing to do with where the margin ends, but editing text in developer formats that is later transformed to end-user formats in a way that gels well with the tools of the Unix environment. Your comment is unnecessarily venomous and not representative of the contents of the article.

Have you noticed how Github helpfully shows which words have changed inside a line when looking at diffs? If we stop teaching people to bend over backwards to accomodate 70s technology, maybe we'll have more young hackers fixing our tools.

Diffs are only half the picture. Is git able to correctly merge two branches which each have single-word edits to a long-line sentence? I'm pretty sure it's not. I think the article is correctly arguing that we should continue to bend over backwards to accommodate 2012 technology.

Re: One sentence per line, please

#20

Post by georgebashi »

lutusp wrote: post #14

> One sentence per line, please I beg to differ: One paragraph per line, please. The natural lexical unit is not the sentence, but the paragraph. These three sentences belong together as a unit, and should be separated from other paragraphs by a double linefeed. If someone wants to later break paragraphs into separate sentences for some reason, it's child's play, and that option is implicit in this formatting. But if…

Your link was broken, I found it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_use_line_brea...
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