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From: Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: AWS Coding Styles (and about boring plain-linear text files in
 the end)
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Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2011 06:21:29 -0500
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Date: 2011-01-19T06:21:29-05:00
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"Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr> writes:

> If you doubt, then a question : where do
> you think these old  systems get this default screen width of 80
> characters ? You think they  were not able to do it wider ? Answer :
> from the ergonomic principle  stated above. 80 characters width was
> not due to technical limitations,  this was a target specification.

And it was appropriate for the languages of the time; assembler,
FORTRAN. 

Languages have improved, it's time to reevaluate that ergonomic
conclusion.

Do you have any evidence that 80 is still the right number?

I have personal experience that 120 is better for me.

> If there is an area where we still unfortunately stick to old obsolete
> systems, the is not about text width, this about two other points: 1)
> ASCII heritage vs Unicode (using either Emacs or VIM for
> multi-language  text files is simply *impossible* most of the time,

This has gotten much better in Emacs recently; it fully supports UTF-8.

-- 
-- Stephe