On Mon, Nov 9, 2015 at 11:51 PM, Richard Eisenberg <e...@cis.upenn.edu> wrote: > At both school and at home I can fit 3 80-character buffers side by > side, at a comfortable font size. Going up (even to 85 cols) would > mean losing a buffer. (Or straining my eyes.) Of course I can deal > with wrapped lines. But I still vote for 80 characters as a target, > while allowing people wiggle room to miss this target. > > The number 80 is with us for historical reasons, but I know I'm not > the only one who still routinely uses 80-column buffers.
It's not just for historical reasons, it's one of those things that turned out to be a reasonable convention: Regardless of the width of windows, it's easier to read limited-width columns. I may be part of a sub-group, but just like a newspaper, I find it easier to "eye-scroll" up and down than left and right. This is the major reason why limiting column width still makes sense. Unless, of course, it's just a few lines, or things that cannot be limited due to technical reasons. I don't know if 120 is too wide, but 100 might be okay. Also, changing the length while touching a line is the most natural way to do it, as white-space reformatting patches, unless done once-only-for-everything-and-never-again, will be noise and make things like git-bisect harder to use. A width limit also is a nice way to alarm you if you start nesting too much :). _______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list ghc-devs@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs