Re: AWS Coding Styles (and about boring plain-linear text files in the end)

["J-P. Rosen" <rosen@adalog.fr>]

Le 18/01/2011 23:03, Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57) a écrit :
> Just wanted to underline again what Pascal Obry also said (and I fully
> agree with, and others too) : the line length limitation is not due to
> any inheritance from old and obsolete systems, this has ergonomic
> motivations. He pointed the example of news-paper. The typical width of
> a news paper or magazine text is even lower : 40 or 50 characters width
> is a common layout. 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.
> 
I beg to (partially) disagree here: reading a newspaper has nothing to
do with reading a program. Columns are intended to have a width that
allows to grasp the whole line without having to move the eyeball - thus
increasing the speed of reading. This is possible because the average
word is 5 letters long, and that the brain is able to reconstruct a
sentence from partial information (fast reading is about not reading
word-by-word).

In programming, most identifiers are far longer than five characters,
especially if you are use-phobic (hint, hint). And you want to read
exactly what's written, not what your brain thinks is written!

The limitation to 80 characters has nothing to do with ergonomy, it was
the width of the 1928 IBM punched card (says one who programmed on
punched cards in his beginnings - not in 1928 though).

I agree that /some/limitation is necessary, but 80 is far to narrow,
leading to excessive folding in nested constructs. My personal taste is
for 120 columns - no problem to view that with any editor, even on small
screens.

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           J-P. Rosen (rosen@adalog.fr)
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