On Mon, 09 Jul 2007 20:13:16 +0200 William James <williamjamesgnusolaris at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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. [...] The wetware between our ears hasn't changed much thought and thats the processing unit that needs to grok this stuff. Sure, the tools can suck up as much white space as important but the next guy who needs to maintain the code sure wouldn't mind if it was basically consistent and easy to read. One part of being easy to read is seeing it as a graphic object (having control flow stand out). Rightward creep tends to make that too busy for our brain to pick up easily. 80 columns is arbitrary but I've rarely found a place where I wanted to go beyond 80 columns that didn't lend itself to something easier to read within 80 columns. mph
