Re: best to have max width of 79 or 80 in source code?

[Xah Lee]

On Nov 30, 11:10 am, "seber...@spawar.navy.mil"
<seber...@spawar.navy.mil> wrote:
> Many try to keep their source code to a max width of around 80.
>
> Someone recommended 79 for some reason but I can't remember why.
>
> Is it because you need to allow another column for newline?
>
> (I think there is a good reason for 79 but for the life of me I can't
> remember
> what it is.)
>
> Chris

in my opinion, hard wrappnig lines or in general any manual code
formatting is a major damage in computing, to the degree that
influenced bad tools and language design which forces humans to think
and do what dumb machines can easily automate. The line wrapping
convention largely spurred the perpetual time wasted on arguing about
code formatting and tools about it.

See:

• The Harm of Hard-wrapping Lines
  http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/hard-wrap.html

• A Simple Lisp Code Formatter
  http://xahlee.org/emacs/lisp_formatter.html

• A Text Editor Feature: Extend Selection By Semantic Unit
  http://xahlee.org/emacs/syntax_tree_walk.html

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄