Patrick Hunt: > We currently follow the Sun coding conventions as documented on our > how to contribute page. This is also consistent with hadoop. Given > this and the fact that the default is 80 in eclipse my preference is > to stay with what we have.
Eclipse plans to increase the line length to 120 characters in the next Version: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=356851 I didn't think that anybody would hold to 80 chars, therefor I give a reasoning: - There's no good reason for 80 other then the tradition from punch cards. - Waiting for Oracle to do anything reasonable might not be reasonable. The java code style was last updated in 1999! - 17" can be regarded as a minimum screen size for a developer while I don't even see problems with 15". - Java nowadays has generics, making lines even longer. - Short lines encourage short, cryptic names instead of descriptive ones. Any other thoughts? Otherwise I'll just wait another decade... :-) Regards, Thomas Koch, http://www.koch.ro
