79 chars or more?

[Jean-Michel Pichavant]

Michele Simionato wrote:
> On Aug 17, 6:50 am, AK <andrei.... at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> On 08/17/2010 12:26 AM, James Mills wrote:
>> By the way, the reason I asked is that we're working on a python
>> tutorial and I realized that even though I'm used to 99, I wasn't sure
>> if it's ok to teach that to new users or not..
>>
>>    -andrei
>>     
>
> It is certainly NOT useful to teach a convention which is explicitly
> discouraged in the Python guidelines (PEP 8). Having said that, I
> particularly *hate* people using long lines, and I usually reindent
> the code of my coworkers not following that convention.
> The reason is that my Emacs is set to 79 chars and longer code looks
> ugly, that I look at two-side diffs all the time, and that sometimes I
> want to print on paper the code I have to work with. OTOH, I do not
> see a single advantage in using long lines.
>
>      Michele Simionato
>   
Using long lines can sometimes improve readability, procude better 
shaped code, 'cause wrapping code to 79 chars may not be "natural" in 
all cases.

We do have a strong habit using meaningfull & plain names in our code, 
no i, j, k ; cmdLine is always replaced by commandLine. So lines can 
easily exceed 79 chars and wrapping it would'nt be easy.
I'm not saying wrapping to 79 is wrong, I'm just saying that they are 
advantages of using long lines (the 1st obvious one being not to care 
about wrapping text).

Saying that, if one intend to distribute its code, he should stick to 80 
chars per line.

JM