On 2021-02-07 22:36, David Mertz wrote:
Code is READ far more often than it is written!
Lines more than 80-ish characters impose a rapidly increasing cognitive
and visual burden with every additional character. Really, starting at
more like 70 characters. It's not quite exponential in the harm, but
it's strongly super-linear, after the threshold.
Setting aside whether this really applies to something like code, where
lots of the line is whitespace, what you're talking about here is the
visual width of the line on the screen. I agree that that can be
important. What I'm saying is that there is no reason for that to
constrain the logical length of the number of characters before a line
break character. It's precisely because code is read more often than
it's written that we should not, at the time of writing it, make these
kinds of needlessly detailed decisions about how it's going to look.
How it looks should be up to the person reading it, and the best way to
do that is to include line breaks in semantically meaningful places and
let the editor (as configured by the reader) choose how to map that onto
a visual display.
--
Brendan Barnwell
"Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no
path, and leave a trail."
--author unknown
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