On 09/07/07, 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.
Actually, another good reason is so that people with visual impairments can work on the code. I used to work on an opensource project where we had this requirement because one of the developers had visual impairment, and keeping things limited to 80 columns allowed him to keep his font sizes nice and big without ugly wrapping. As far as the "Sun rules" -- well, despite what you say being true, at this point, most of the OpenSolaris community is from Sun, and since most of our code goes to and comes from Sun, it only makes since to stay consistent. Even if Sun weren't involved, changing formatting rules because you don't like them is silly whenever the majority of the codebase already has a particular style. -- Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst binarycrusader at gmail.com - http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/ "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. " --Donald Knuth
