From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,8143b93889fe9472 X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,domainid0,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII X-Received: by 10.180.74.141 with SMTP id t13mr2248710wiv.5.1359623394405; Thu, 31 Jan 2013 01:09:54 -0800 (PST) Path: i11ni30817wiw.0!nntp.google.com!proxad.net!feeder1-2.proxad.net!newsfeed.straub-nv.de!news-2.dfn.de!news.dfn.de!news.uni-weimar.de!medsec1.medien.uni-weimar.de!lucks From: Stefan.Lucks@uni-weimar.de Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Ada standard and maximum line lengths Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2013 10:10:23 +0100 Organization: Bauhaus-Universitaet Weimar Message-ID: References: <8dfcf819-e1d0-4578-a795-a4bf724b5014@googlegroups.com> <5107b329$0$6556$9b4e6d93@newsspool4.arcor-online.net> <5107eaed$0$6566$9b4e6d93@newsspool4.arcor-online.net> <51080c38$0$6561$9b4e6d93@newsspool4.arcor-online.net> <51085776$0$6637$9b4e6d93@newsspool2.arcor-online.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: medsec1.medien.uni-weimar.de Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Trace: tigger.scc.uni-weimar.de 1359623394 7094 141.54.178.228 (31 Jan 2013 09:09:54 GMT) X-Complaints-To: news@tigger.scc.uni-weimar.de NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2013 09:09:54 +0000 (UTC) X-X-Sender: lucks@debian In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Alpine 2.02 (DEB 1266 2009-07-14) Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=ISO-8859-15; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE Date: 2013-01-31T10:10:23+01:00 List-Id: 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.=20 But in practice, wouldn't you limit it to some constant, say,=20 Integer'Last? In any case, nobody should need line lengths of more than about 200=20 characters. This is not a technological limit, this is related to human=20 vision. The typical line length (about 80 characters) has been chosen to=20 be well-readable by humans. (Actually, most people consider this a bit too= =20 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,= =20 so they need more on the right. But that has to end at some point -- if=20 your program is too deeply nested, you should refactorize it, rather than= =20 indent even more. So 120 characters should be plenty. Anything beyond that= =20 should not be considered as readable for humans, anymore. You many push this further by writing in some two-column style (commands=20 on the left, comments on the right). But even then, 200 characters are=20 plenty (close to 120 for the commands, a few spaces and "--" to separate=20 the comments from the commands, and another 80 for the comments). The only reason to support longer lines would be to handle automatically=20 generated code, that is *not* meant to be human-readable. In fact, writing= =20 tools to generate source code is (slightly) easier if one does not need to= =20 care about line ends at all, writing a source file into a single line ... Stefan -- ------ I love the taste of Cryptanalysis in the morning! ------ --Stefan.Lucks (at) uni-weimar.de, Bauhaus-Universit=E4t Weimar, Germany--