On 2021-02-07 09:59, Christopher Barker wrote:
All that being said, it's not that big a deal, and I personally don't try to limit to 80 chars per line anyway -- preferring 90 or 95 -- I haven't used a VT100 in decades ....
To be honest I find it kind of ridiculous that people are still worrying about line lengths in this day and age. It's especially strange that people will talk about how a proposed feature interacts with relatively sophisticated editor/IDE features like syntax highlighting and autocompletion, yet still have no problem working with editors that are woefully limited on a much more basic feature. It's called line wrapping. We as humans should not be concerned with how long LOGICAL lines are until and unless it actually impinges on our ability to comprehend them. The appearance of the VISUAL line should not enter into our decision-making because that's a matter for the editor displaying the code. There's no reason not have lines that are 200 or 300 or even 1000 characters long if you want to (for instance for a long string literal); it's the editor's job to take a semantically-motivated set of lines and indentations and display them attractively. Then if different people have different preferences they can set their editors to different line widths and see the code in their preferred format. Editors that don't support such features need to be fixed and we shouldn't continue to enable them by insisting that people distort the semantic structure of their code to fit arbitrary guidelines like 80 or 95 characters. A person should insert a line break whenever they think it's a good idea for semantic reasons (e.g., separating statements) and not insert any when they don't think so, and leave the rest up to the editor. -- Brendan Barnwell "Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no path, and leave a trail." --author unknown