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Re: [groff] man 7 groff; was nroff.1.man Make editorial fixes.


From: Tadziu Hoffmann
Subject: Re: [groff] man 7 groff; was nroff.1.man Make editorial fixes.
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2019 20:26:24 +0200
User-agent: Mutt/1.11.4 (2019-03-13)

> I advocate the "one sentence per line" rule [...]

If you mean "one whole sentence per line", then I'll object.
I think it's good to start each sentence on a new line, while
still breaking the text at semantically convenient boundaries
so that no source text line exceeds a certain limit
(for example, 72 characters).

When writing *roff text, you'll need to break your lines
anyway, if you're calling macros.  And, for example,

  implemented the even more ancient
  .B runoff
  of the
  .I Multics
  operating system

is far easier to read than

  implemented the even more ancient \fBrunoff\fP of
  the \fIMultics\fP operating system


Remember "The story of Mel"?  I'm not sure where this came from,
but I think it has the appropriate cadence.  Also, many of these
"common sense" guidelines for writing nroff text were even more
useful in the days when "ed" was your text editor, since it was
much easier to jump to a certain line than to change some words
in the middle of a very long line of text.



                           -=*=-

> <https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Alhadis/Coding-Style/master/README.md>

You forgot trailing space.  Anyone leaving trailing space
in their code deserves to be publicly humiliated.
(Unless achieving a particular result makes this necessary,
of course.)

[Also, indenting code is purely cosmetic (unless you're using
Python), so it should be done using spaces.]


> Text reflow? What the hell is that?

Impressive.  Reminds me of the sample texts they used to have
in typing courses way back when, which also managed to have
exactly the same number of characters on every line.  How much
work did it take to finesse the text into being like this?





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