Re: PATCH, RFC: 2.6 Documentation/Codingstyle

[Ed Tomlinson <edt@aei.ca>]

On February 13, 2004 06:42 am, Andries Brouwer wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 13, 2004 at 09:58:02AM +0100, Giuliano Pochini wrote:
> >> +The limit on the length of lines is 80 columns and this is a hard
> >> limit.
> >
> > Well, I think this requirement is a bit silly IMHO. How many of us
> > do usually code in a 80x25 terminal screen nowadays ?
>
> I do. (That is, 80xN with N in 24..60 or so.)
>
> The 80 here has a pedagogical and a practical purpose.
> The practical one is that it makes sure that everybody can read the source.
> The pedagogical is to invite you to arrange the code in a different way
> if you are nesting too deeply or your expressions are too complicated.
>
> There is also ergonomics. There is a reason newspapers do not print
> text across the full width of the page - it would be very difficult
> to read. There is an optimal column width. One might fight over the
> exact value of the optimum, but 80 columns is not a bad choice.

This would be true if not for indenting.  A program is not a newspaper.
I doubt the lenght of text, excluding the indent is longer than 80 chars
very often....   With 80 columns and indenting code looks ugly.

Ed Tomlinson