>On 7/9/07, James Carlson <james.d.carlson at sun.com> wrote: >> Josh Hurst writes: >> > On 7/4/07, Peter Memishian <peter.memishian at sun.com> wrote: >> > > * 113-143: Please reformat to be 80-column friendly. >> > >> > Why? It may be appropriate for the 60' of the last century but today >> [...] >> >> Because the style guide says so: >> >> >> http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/documentation/getting_started_docs/cstyle.ms.pdf > >That are Sun rules, not Opensolaris rules. It seems archaic today to >have a 50 year old punch card-style 80-column limit. Computers use >silicon chips, not vacuum tubes. Punch cards have been obsoleted, >operating systems use more than 640k, disks can hold more than 4GB. I >think the Slashdot article is right: A 80-column limit is history.
They're the OpenSolaris rules we took from Solaris. And they are, IMHO, still valid rules; 132 character lines do not add anything; rather, they annoyingly waste 40% of screen real estate. Why do you think newspapers are set in colums? Because we can't read or follow long lines very well. 80 characters are a good compromise. Changing to 132 requires *everyone* to change their habits; it limits the amount of source code people can display on a single screen dramatically (by 40% and that in many cases means 1 rather than two full width windows or 2 instead of 4. "Archaic" is not a good argument. It's like proposing to make all lanes on highways 50% wider "because the width of a horse drawn carriage is an archaic standard". Casper
