Re: Ada standard and maximum line lengths

[Stefan.Lucks@uni-weimar.de]

On Wed, 30 Jan 2013, Robert A Duff wrote:

> There are various ways to store line/column numbers compactly without
> limiting line lengths.

It certainly is possible to do that without *any* limit on line lengths. 
But in practice, wouldn't you limit it to some constant, say, 
Integer'Last?

In any case, nobody should need line lengths of more than about 200 
characters. This is not a technological limit, this is related to human 
vision. The typical line length (about 80 characters) has been chosen to 
be well-readable by humans. (Actually, most people consider this a bit too 
large ... but let us stick with "about 80" for the sake of the argument.)

Note that 80 is the limit for prosaic texts, not for programs.

Programmers may argue that indention eats up a lot of columns at the left, 
so they need more on the right. But that has to end at some point -- if 
your program is too deeply nested, you should refactorize it, rather than 
indent even more. So 120 characters should be plenty. Anything beyond that 
should not be considered as readable for humans, anymore.

You many push this further by writing in some two-column style (commands 
on the left, comments on the right). But even then, 200 characters are 
plenty (close to 120 for the commands, a few spaces and "--" to separate 
the comments from the commands, and another 80 for the comments).

The only reason to support longer lines would be to handle automatically 
generated code, that is *not* meant to be human-readable. In fact, writing 
tools to generate source code is (slightly) easier if one does not need to 
care about line ends at all, writing a source file into a single line ...


Stefan

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