I wanted to make it clear that this is not the time to bring again the
arguments, as there have been ample discussions on the topic in the
past. In particular your arguments that you now repeated have been
definitely read and understood, as well as refuted.
This is the time to conclude all that discussion with a simple decision.
Again, clearly some limit must exist because current code editors don't
handle long lines satisfactorily and some contributors want to keep
editing windows less than most or full screen width.
I think a soft limit (very strongly recommended) of 80 columns and a
hard limit (absolute, forget about merging your code if you don't
observe) of 120 columns would be agreeable to all current and potential
contributors.
Thanks,
Andrei
On 04/10/2011 12:04 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
80 characters. Not a phobos contributor, but I've been coding for 20 years
in various languages. Long lines are hard to read - almost invariable
nasty compound expressions (which should be factored for readability) or
extremely long identifier names (nothing wrong with this, but ids should
be as long as necessary and no longer. There is no benefit to putting so
much stuff onto a single line.
If you don't like coding style rules, tough - welcome to the real world.
Until we write an IDE that operates on ASTs and formats code on an
individual basis, we will continue to have to do these things.
P.S. As a general rule, maintain the formatting style of the file in which
you are making edits (spacing, bracing, etc.)
I confess that I've never understood why anyone would think that 80 characters
was enough. And almost everyone that I've ever discussed it with prior to it
coming up on the newsgroups here has thought that an 80 character limit was
outdated and constraining, so to find folks here thinking that 80 characters
is a good limit is very odd. It's just too short.
The main problem is indenting. If no code were indented, then 80 characters
wouldn't be so bad. But when you indent much at all (especially with 4
characters per level of indentation), 80 characters very quickly becomes too
short. And if you have appropriately descriptive symbol names, then you're
doubly screwed.
So, while a character limit may make sense, I don't understand how anyone
could be happy with only 80 characters. Sure, there are plenty of lines of
code that will fit within 80 characters, but it doesn't take much at all
before they don't - particularly with 4 characters per level of indentation
and properly descriptive variable names. 80 is just too restrictive. 80
characters after the indentation wouldn't generally be a problem, but when it
includes the indentation, it's definitely a problem.
- Jonathan M Davis
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