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Comment by dedward | Hacker News Reader

It's not a sneak test - it's an actual grammar test. If you are asked to document something, and you can't observe basic english grammar, I see a problem too. Zero tolerance may be taking it a bit too far, but one would imagine he can tell the difference between a typo in a big test and actual fundamental lack of knowledge of the grammar you should have learned by the time you were 14.

(Yes, the double space after the period is a built in habit from typing class, and a debatable item in the computer age, but nobody seems to care one way or the other.)

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> but nobody seems to care one way or the other.

Typographers do! Double-space is OK for monospace fonts, but otherwise single-space is almost universally preferred for avoiding so-called "rivers" of whitespace.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing_in_language_an...

Indeed. I'd point out that LaTeX does kerning independent of number of spaces after a period. I usually put two spaces when I type because I do a lot with monochrome fonts including all my LaTeX sources, but really, it is no substitute for proper kerning.

> I'd point out that LaTeX does kerning independent of number of spaces after a period.

This is misleading. Yes, LaTeX ignores how many spaces you put after the period in the source; but it does lay out extra space after sentence-ending characters. To avoid the extra space (e.g. if you have a mid-sentence abbreviation) you have to backslash it!

> (Yes, the double space after the period is a built in habit from typing class, and a debatable item in the computer age, but nobody seems to care one way or the other.)

Well, it does serve a purpose in the computer age - grepping for sentence ending.

Also, it makes it easier to determine when a sentence ends that contains an abbreviation. (This refers to when most people would use periods at the end of abbreviations.) I still use double spacing even though standard HTML does not display the double spacing on web pages.

The following sentences are an example of what I was saying:

"I sent the N.D.A. to N.Y. It arrived three days later."

The single space after the "A" in "N.D.A." indicates that the sentence has not ended even though there is a period.

Actually with a [A-Z]. [a-z] that's an easy case.

The harder case is an [A-Z]. [A-Z] which is not a sentence ending. Consider the following:

"When we compare the use of mistakes in speech in the Saga of St. Olaf with some of the other Old Norse literature, we can see that there is, in fact, a pattern of use of errors in speech being a sort of death omen."

The single space there identifies that there is no end of sentence between St. and Olaf. Of course when you are working in LaTeX you have to tell LaTeX that this is a word break and not a sentence break or else it will kern it as an end-of-sentence.

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