Aahz wrote:
On Thu, May 21, 2009, Raymond Hettinger wrote:
Could you explain why you have so much emotion invested in this issue? I'm mostly having light-hearted fun with it. The conversation wasn't going anywhere from the start. I do find it funny that so many
Aahz: think 80 is exactly the right number regardless of other whitespace conventions or regardless of the language being used.
If that's what you think people are saying, I don't think you are using sufficient care in your reading. It seems to me that people are mostly saying that eighty columns is enough for many purposes, there are problems that would come from increasing the number of columns, and there aren't any solid arguments that clearly demonstrate that the gains outweigh the detriments.
Well, on Ubuntu I use the gnome terminal which has line width settings of 80 and 132. It doesn't have any settings in-between. So I use 80X24 because it gives me plenty of room to see other windows. Possibly if there was a 100 character width, I might use it. The 132 character width setting takes up too much horizontal room on my desktop. I found that if I use small font sizes, I tend to lean closer to the monitor than I should and that causes my neck and back to ache if I'm at my computer for longer than a few hours. So although I can reduce the font size and get a lot more characters across the screen, it is better for my health if I don't do that. Cheers, Ron