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Comment by smcn | Hacker News Reader

My Emacs is reporting that `count-words` was "Probably introduced at or before Emacs version 24.1." but good post regardless.

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I think the author means that count-words already existed, but only reported words and characters. Now it also reports the amount of sentences.

That's entirely my bad. Reread it and it was obvious what was being said!

> *now also reports the number of sentences*

Emphasis added.

WOW That means Emacs has the smarts now to decide where a full stop ends a sentence and can follow up with double spacing.

> The sentence commands assume that you follow the American typist’s convention of putting two spaces at the end of a sentence. That is, a sentence ends wherever there is a ‘.’, ‘?’ or ‘!’ followed by the end of a line or two spaces, with any number of ‘)’, ‘]’, ‘'’, or ‘"’ characters allowed in between. A sentence also begins or ends wherever a paragraph begins or ends. It is useful to follow this convention, because it allows the Emacs sentence commands to distinguish between periods that end a sentence and periods that indicate abbreviations.

(https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Se...)

That's a good convention for people taught typing on a typewriter but pretty bad for younger folks.

Disagree. I wasn't taught on a typewriter, (although my mother did teach typing), but any plain text will be aided by that convention.

Yes, it's not necessary with justified text when using (for example) TeX.

But seeing a solid wall of text in a long paragraph with no hints as to its sentence structure other than a tiny "."? No thanks.

Perhaps this is true but the convention is no longer in use pedagogically.

Of course Emacs has a configuration option you can toggle which disables the need for a double space after a sentence.

That's odd, as Emacs had this function long before being ported to C/elisp, i.e. over 40 years ago.

Over 40 years ago is definitely "at or before" Emacs 24.1. Specifically before.

As far as I can tell, the "probably introduced at or before" info comes from finding a symbol's first appearance in NEWS. So if there were no changes to `count-words` between Emacs 1 and 24, this is what you'd get.

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