Re: Is 80-column source code formatting still standard ?

On 25/06/2008, at 3:34 PM, Mary Gardiner wrote:

> One point in favour of approx 80 character lines in both code and
> writing is that apparently there is some suggestion that it's much
> more natural to read text of that width than it is to read really long
> lines.

I entirely agree that shorter lines of text make for easier reading,  
but I'm not convinced that argument applies to code.  If you have a  
big expression, you don't have too many choices.  You can split the  
expression up into its own dedicated functions, which may lower  
readability by forcing you to navigate around the file to figure out  
what's going on.  You can use shorter variable names, but that almost  
always lowers code readability.  You can assign sub-expressions to  
intermediate variables, but then you have the burden of naming the  
variables for the sub-expressions, plus you probably also want to mark  
that intermediate variable as immutable (const) otherwise it's one  
more possible stateful variable to keep track up when trying to  
understand how a function works.  I don't think it'll be hard to find  
cases where a 160-character line is a lot more maintainable than  
trying to split it into 3 or 4 lines of 50 columns each.

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