Re: Debian coding style?
uwd38znr@umail.furryterror.org (Zygo Blaxell) writes:
> "Why 78 characters per line of code?"
> "Because the laser printer wants that."
> "Why does the laser printer want that?"
> "Uhhh...because IBM made a business decision in the 1950's?"
I will actually point out that although the exact number 80 is
arbitrary, the general number "about 80" is not.
The issue is that that's the number of characters/line that looks good
to the human eye - typesetters know this; open a book and count. Too
much longer than that (say, 200 columns) and it becomes difficult when
tracking your eye all the way back to the left to find the right row.
This is remembered vaguely from an introduction I saw once to writing
(I think) LaTeX style files, talking about classic beginner mistakes.
Short lines are good.
Of course, I suppose one could then say "but code lines that stick out
past the 80th column are mostly indentation - your eye is only
tracking back 40 characters". Well, that's true, but the eye tracking
issue does help to explain why a printer (designed, most likely, for
printing text that's not mostly indentation) would pick some number
near 80 as its line length
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