On Wed, Jan 1, 2014 at 12:33 PM, Dahua Lin <[email protected]> wrote: > > I agree that overly long lines hurt readability. However, I think a hard > threshold of 80 chars is too restrictive. Just take a quick skim of the > Julia code base, you will find plenty of lines well beyond this limit (even > lines over 120 chars are not uncommon). > > This is kind of related to some of the Julia's language features (e.g. > parameter annotation, and one-line definition of functions, etc). In such > cases, code lines that are a little bit longer wouldn't make a big problem. > I found it sometimes even more annoying to break lines simply for the sake > of the fitting some limit on line length. >
I think that this points to some additional guidelines about how to cleanly break expressions up across line breaks. I tend to follow python guidelines on this, though I'm python-biased: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#indentation I think it's good to have a number (80 chars) for what's considered a long line. I typically am working in a terminal window with several files open side-by-side, and having a consistent width makes it easier to navigate and see what's going on. It also makes the code easier to read in diffs, on github, etc. -s
