Re: [TUHS] 80 columns ...

On 10 Nov 2017, at 20:05, Jon Steinhart <jon(a)fourwinds.com> wrote: Nemo writes: I agree on Python but for a slightly different reason. In 1981 I wrote a user interface for the Tektronix microprocessor development systems. The executable plus all of the script data had to fit in memory on the PDP-11. This was an exercise in byte-counting to make everything fit because of the cost of overflowing a segment by a byte. Because of this I used indent level as part of the scripting language. Got beaten to a pulp by other folks in the group about it and had to waste a few precious bytes processing curly braces instead. So I'm too scarred to be able to use Python without cringing. Separate from this, I think that the whole 80 column thing is a bit silly. I have used 132 as by default for a long time now. Would go wider but just because I have always found it worthwhile spending money on the best monitors doesn't mean that everyone else can. Everything including my laptop is now a UHD monitor which rocks! I feel that longer lines work better than one-character variable names. And, longer lines are way more readable than wrapped lines. I have never been fond of the notion that code should be broken up into functions for the purpose of keeping lines short; I feel that code should be broken up into functions if it makes sense to do so, for example if the functions are used more than once. Writing for the limitations of the I/O device doesn't seem to be a good paradigm. In any case, I don't think that being an old UNIX person means that one has to live in the past. There was nothing magic about 80 columns; it was just the technology of the time. Technology has changed, so move on. Jon