On Thu, 21 Feb 2019 11:59:56 -0800 Raymond Hettinger <raymond.hettin...@gmail.com> wrote: > > PEP 8 is mostly about readability. However, the line length limit often > seems to cause less readable code.
There are well-known typography rules around line length and readability, both on screen and in print. See e.g.: https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability It's not straight-forward how to apply these for code, because it is typically indented, with varying levels of indentation (should the indentation count towards character line length when making up a rule of thumb for readability?). However, there is a commonly held idea - with centuries of experience backing it - that overly long lines makes text or code less readable (look at your typical newspaper or magazine: it splits pages of text into a number of columns so as to limit line width). And "overly long" starts rather early, around 50-80 characters for non-indented text according to most typographers. For code, a 80 character limit is common, as are other limits such as 90 and 100. In any case, each project can customize their pep8 / flake8 settings easily. PEP 8 doesn't aim to be an inflexible standard (we don't even apply it mechanically in the stdlib). Regards Antoine. _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
