Re: Lout parsing

[Ian Jackson]

I'm afraid I have to agree with Blake McBride's message of 0650GMT on
the 13th of February, where he describes what I agree is a better
scheme for space handling.

I'd just like to point out some of the flaws in the
arguments/proposals I have seen here:

* Jeff Kingston's proposal requires you to ensure that all your
sentences end at the end of lines.  This is hard to do, and interferes
with the editing.  Blake McBride's proposal, on the other hand, merely
requires you to use a double space at the end of sentences (which
is much easier to do and some people think ought to be done anyway).

* Basile Starynkevitch complains:
> So, I think that Lout parsing should take into account that some of it
> input is not human typed but computer generated. Hence, Lout
> tokenization should take into account, and shouldn't introduce complex
> lexical rules.

Blake McBride's proposal doesn't include unpredictable rules.  In
order to ensure that a space is considered a middle-of-sentence space
it is simply necessary not to break the line there; in order to ensure
that it is it is simply necessary to add a linebreak or another
space.

Remember that computers are here to serve us; it is better for
programs that produce Lout to have to do a bit more work than for
humans who produce Lout to do more work !

* Tom Gordon suggests requiring ~ for non-sentence-ending space.  I am
strongly opposed to this.  TeX's requirement for using backslash-space
in the same situation has confused and continues to confuse many new
users, and makes the markup input look very ugly and hard to read.

There is no need for it, either.

Ian.