On Mon, 2020-07-13 at 09:18 -0700, Greg A. Woods wrote: > > At Mon, 13 Jul 2020 09:48:07 -0400 (EDT), Mouse <mo...@rodents-montreal.org> > wrote: > Subject: Re: style change: explicitly permit braces for single statements > > > > Slavishly always > > adding them makes it difficult to keep code from walking into the right > > margin: > > These days one really should consider the right margin to be a virtual > concept -- there's really no valid reason not to have and use horizontal > scrolling (any code editor I'll ever use can do it on any display), and > even most any small-ish laptop can have a nice readable font at 50x132, > or even 50x160. (i.e. that's another style guide rule that should die)
Sorry, but I strongly have to disagree. Text line length does matter to those of us who put several copies of code side by side. In that scenario your total screen size does not matter, there still is not enough room for 120 characters on a line in one of the files, or all of them. "But _my_ screen is soo wide" only kind of works when one considers a single file on the screen at any time, or only vertically split windows. That's only half the truth. Even with multiple screens you still may want to put several applications including editors or text windows side by side, and avoid having to switch between them, or chose which of them you can see at a time. And no, I would not want to _have_ to side scroll, just to (start to) see the code with runs out of the screen's right hand side. It breaks the flow, is terribly slow and tedious to control, and makes it hard(er) to spot matching braces that are vertically aligned to their opening construct. While none of the flow breaking obstacles are necessary. There are useful cases where longer text lines are appropriate ("stupid" data tables, user visible string literals that you want to be able to grep for when researching a bug report). Those _are_ useful, but should remain the exception. From personal experience I found the 80 chars limit the hardest to get used to, but once you get it, a very useful one. Even today. Because reasons, it's not as arbitrary as it may seem. There is a reason why papers and web pages are laid out in columns. It's more than just a tradition. Has to do with readability. Really. Try to find the start of the next line after the previous line was rather long. Even more so with the tiny fonts that you mention above. And screens got smaller again with mobile devices after they got bigger before. History keeps repeating. :) virtually yours Gerhard Sittig -- If you don't understand or are scared by any of the above ask your parents or an adult to help you.