Re: Warn on mid-input line sentence endings

[Alejandro Colomar]

On 5/2/23 00:21, josh wrote:
> Hi, I'm here with a quick tangent.

Hi Josh,

> 
> It turns out that there is a lot of discourse out there about "semantic
> newlines", under a few different names. So far the names I've seen are:
> 
> - One Sentence Per Line (OSPL)

This forgets about clauses and phrases (see below).

> - Semantic Line Breaks (SemBr)

I like this one.

> - Semantic Linefeeds

Since we call ASCII LF the newline character (\n), I think newlines
would be a more common term under Unix.  Linefeed is a term I rarely
see; and only in non-Unix contexts (e.g., IETF RFCs).

> - Ventilated Prose

What is ventilated in the context of prose?  Not too clear to me just by
reading dict(1).

> - Semantic newlines (just on this list)

This one is in use in man-pages(7).

> 
> Reading through the pages below was helpful in getting a better idea of
> what language people use to discuss this. They're mostly historical
> retrospectives or arguments for the merit of semantic newlines.
> 
> https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2012/one-sentence-per-line
> https://ramshankar.org/blog/posts/2019/semantic-line-breaks
> https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/ventilated-prose
> https://discuss.python.org/t/semantic-line-breaks/13874
> https://discuss.python.org/t/one-sentence-per-line-for-peps-and-more/13920
> https://sembr.org
> https://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoc-recommended-practices/#one-sentence-per-line

You can also read man-pages(7):

```
   Use semantic newlines
       In the source of a manual page, new sentences should be started
       on  new  lines,  long  sentences  should be split into lines at
       clause breaks (commas, semicolons, colons, and so on), and long
       clauses should be split at phrase boundaries.  This convention,
       sometimes known as "semantic newlines", makes it easier to  see
       the  effect of patches, which often operate at the level of in‐
       dividual sentences, clauses, or phrases.
```

<https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/commit/man7/man-pages.7?id=6ff6f43d68164f99a8c3fb66f4525d145571310c>

> 
> (Actually I think one-sentence-per-line denotes something slightly different
> from semantic-line-breaks, not that I know what that difference is).

Yeah, one-sentence-per-line only requires breaking at sentence
boundaries, while with semantic newlines, the intent is that all
newlines are well tought.  Places for placing semantic newlines can be
(apart from sentence boundaries, of course) clause boundaries or phrase
boundaries (in the latter case, there's controversy in this list
regarding how strict one should be).  I tend to be on the strictest
side, as it helps me considerably when reading patches.

Cheers,
Alex

> 
> Hope this is interesting,
> Josh

-- 
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