(d) It makes it easier to work with a fixed-width terminal
or terminal emulator.
You may think this is an obsolete requirment, but I spend
most of my working days using a VT-100 emulator connected
to various servers running just Oracle, gdb, gcc, vi, and
a shell.
At 09:34 AM 3/6/2003, Paul Beardsley wrote:
>Hello,
>
>I have a question about coding style which maybe fits the list criteria of "technical
>discussion about a library'.
>
>The Boost style guide recommends 80 column text without giving any justification for
>this. What is your opinion of this constraint?
>
>The three supporting arguments I hear are
>
>(a) It makes it possible to print code. Personally I never print code. I understand
>it might be useful given, say, 15 people in a room doing a code review but even then
>I think it would be better to bring in laptops and PCs and look at the electronic
>version. For one thing at least then everyone ends up with the same annotations.
>
>(b) It makes it possible to do side-by-side comparisons of two slightly differing
>pieces of code. Occasionally I need to do a comparison but I really try to avoid it
>- there is something wrong if the development process keeps throwing up the need for
>a laborious (error-prone) manual comparison of pieces of code.
>
>(c) Reading test over 80 columns makes your eyes tired, that's why typesetters
>traditionally converged on the 80 column solution. I think that reading
>highly-structured code is different to reading straight text, so I don't know if the
>lessons from straight text carry over.
>
>My arguments for longer-than-80-column lines would be the following. These arguments
>apply specifically to header files -
>
>(i) It's easier to parse a header file with one method per line. Longer lines make
>this more likely.
>
>(ii) It's preferable to have inline method definitions with the declaration, for
>short methods. Longer lines again make this more likely.
>
>(iii) The structure of the code throws up other cases where one method per line makes
>for readability e.g. overloaded methods benefit from being on consecutive lines so
>that the first part of the text corresponds directly and only the signatures differ.
>
>The most powerful argument in favor of 80-column text is just that 'everyone does
>it', or that you cannot anticipate that somebody-somewhere might have a device that
>needs 80-column text. But these seem more like arguments by inertia and surely
>readability is more important. So I wondered what the general opinion of boost
>developers is on this issue,
>
>Thanks,
>
>Paul Beardsley.
>
>
>
>
>
>Do you Yahoo!?
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