[texhax] Differentiating sentences in a paragraph

[Neal H. Walfield]

At Wed, 16 Jan 2013 17:52:31 -0700,
Gordon Haverland wrote:
> Sure, in a UTF-8 world, there could be a special end-of-sentence 
> chracter and a special end-of-paragraph character.

In an ASCII world, there is no special end-of-sentence marker and two
spaces became a common convention to mark the end of a sentence.

It is so common, in fact, that Emacs offers sentence motion commands
(M-e, M-a) to move the mark between sentences.  Emacs recognizes the
end of a sentence period by looking to see whether it is followed by
two spaces.  This functionality was documented in GNU Emacs 18.59,
which was released on October 30, 1992.  Version 18.59 is the earliest
version that I found.  Most likely it was added even earlier.

I just found out that vi also offers similar commands ('(' and ')'),
but I don't know how old they are or how they recognize an end of
sentence.

Neal