On 80 columns should (not) be enough for everyone

[Russel Winder]

On Mon, 2011-01-31 at 13:41 -0500, bearophile wrote:
[ . . . ]
> I think 110 columns are a little too many. I have suggested 90-95
> chars max (but less than 80 on average) after seeing both the problems
> caused by too much short lines (to keep lines below 70-80 chars I have
> seen programmers use 2 spaces to indent or use very short variable
> names. This is worse than 95 chars long lines), and seeing lines with
> 120+ chars that cause troubles to older programmer that can't use a
> too much small font because of their older eyes.

What say we cut the agist crap.

Just because anyone over 50 (like me) has worsening eyesight doesn't
mean they can't work quite happily with 110 character lines using 8pt
fonts.  I like 110 character lines in smaller fonts, and I like 2 space
indents.  And proportional fonts -- Ocean Sans MT rules -- why all this
monospace font obsession (*).

At the end of the day source code consistency is the only really
important thing.  Anyone amending a file or adding a file to a codebase
must do it in the style of the current code so as to avoid spoiling
consistency, and creating specious changes in version control.  Just
because I object to a coding style doesn't mean I can't use it if I am
amending someone else code.

Whoever is the project leader for a project defines a style and then
everyone works with it -- even if that style is some crappy 80 column
stupidity ;-)


(*)  Flame wars should be directed to /dev/null -- or if you insist on
using Windows, whatever the equivalent is. :-)
-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at russel.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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