Terminals used to have 80 columns almost universally back in the 80's (yes, you can find exceptions). CGA/MHA/VGA consoles still do because they were designed to replace said terminals. The notion, at least for FreeBSD, was that you'd want to be able to easily hack on the code if you had to on the console. Likely a bit antiquated, but there's a solid reason for it.

There's other side effects of that, most of which are good, but some crazy...

Warner

On Wed, Nov 8, 2017 at 1:13 PM, ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:

There's a lot of weird lore around use of C nowadays, a lot of it in my experience from folks who come from Java. But this w & MASK discussion is one of the weirder ones.

For me one of the worst is the 80-column requirement that came from out of I don't know where. Let's see, we're all getting 4k monitors, and yet somehow
80 columns is how we have to write code? Hollerith would be proud.

On Wed, Nov 8, 2017 at 11:05 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
On Wed, Nov 08, 2017 at 06:14:20PM +0000, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
> is better then why stop there? Why not
>
> if (((w & MASK) != FALSE) == TRUE)

Thanks for this, that's the perfect come back to the pedantic folks.