We're re-covering some familiar ground here. I have a few points I'd like to make.
1. "Semantic newlines" is a terrible term. We should abandon it at
once. The detection of sentence boundaries is not restricted to
newlines, and you *don't* want to warn on _those_, but on the ones
that appear in the _midst_ of an input line.
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2022-07/msg00074.html
2. Bjarni's comment '"groff" is not the right tool for such things, but
"grep" is.' is thoroughly wrong-headed and Ingo was right to reject
it with great force. Here a few reasons why. I don't think any of
B through D are relevant to mandoc(1) since it doesn't support the
features in question (as far as I know).
A. The formatter decides where sentence boundaries are based on its
input.
B. Use of the `cflags' request can change the characters that have
sentence-ending semantics. grep(1) cannot know this.
C. Sentence-ending characters are subject to character translation
(the `tr` request). grep(1) cannot know this.
D. The user/document could define a special character that is a
sentence-ending character (with `char` and `cflags`). grep(1)
cannot know this.
3. The artificial intelligence detecting sentence boundaries is already
in the formatter; no one needs to add it. Moreover, it was already
present in AT&T troff.
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2022-07/msg00080.html
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2022-07/msg00084.html
Since this subject is a recurring trash fire, I should note one
development since last summer's discussion. I would prefer now to lump
this feature into a new warning category called "style" because I have
thought of another couple of things to put in it. I still mean to leave
this warning category disabled by default. I will opt in to it in my
personal working environment. Others might choose to follow.
https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?62776
Regards,
Branden
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