Re: OT: Top Posting
On Wed, May 15, 2024 at 09:46:08AM -0400, Cindy Sue Causey wrote:
> Best as I was able to discern from the Net [0], 72 characters is the
> magic number for line length because 4 extra characters are added to
> both ends when e.g. git processes submissions. Makes good common sense
> to me.
>
> PS I thought it was 80. Guess it was about those extra 8 characters.
For many decades, there was an industry standard that lines of text
should be up to 80 characters wide. Punch cards were 80 characters wide,
for example. I don't know whether punch cards were the *first* place
it appeared, but they're the first I'm aware of.
A lot of the printers from the last century allowed 80 characters
per line on standard US 8.5x11 inch paper. I'm not sure if teletypes
used 80-column paper, or 133-column paper (green bar), or a mixture.
Later, we got terminals. A typical ASCII terminal (a physical one, like
a DEC VT-100) is 80x24 characters, or sometimes 80x25. The 80-character
line standard continued.
When hardware evolved and most of us started using X11 or similar GUI
interfaces, terminal emulators became the norm. xterm and other software
terminal emulators use an 80x24 window as the default, for compatibility
with physical terminals.
When writing code in most programming languages, there are style guides
that still suggest sticking to 80-character lines whenever possible.
It avoids line wrapping when being read in an 80-character terminal,
and besides that, really long lines of code are harder to read than
shorter lines.
When it comes to email or Usenet, though, the 72-character suggestion
is meant to allow a bit of room for quoting markup. If I write a
79-character line of text, and then you reply to it with "> " in front,
the resulting 81-character line of text either gets wrapped or truncated.
Limiting yourself to 72-character lines allows a few levels of quoting
before the text becomes unreadable.
This is why the 72-character limit is just a suggestion, not a hard
requirement. If you write lines that are 74 characters wide, probably
nobody's going to care. The goal is simply to make it easy to carry
on a conversation.
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