Re: [perl #90906] smartmatch PATCH 1 of 2 for 5.14.1: perlop.pod

Russ Allbery wrote on 05/18/2011 12:53 PM:
> Tom Christiansen <[email protected]> writes:
> 
>> Manpages *can* get linewrapped or snipped at 65 columns.  Currently
>> they seem actually to work on at least one system, but I haven't 
>> done any checking around.
> 
> Most of the man implementations I've seen recently have started wrapping
> at the terminal width or at 80 columns, but older man implementations
> definitely wrapped narrower.  I would expect to see problems, if any, on
> systems like IRIX, old Solaris, that sort of thing.  I no longer have
> readily available the wide variety of UNIX implementations I used to have
> to check things like this.

Having been, in years past, the person responsible for maintaining the
man page formatting tools for SGI and Cray systems, I vote for the
80-column-or-narrower widths. We did 72 columns iirc, on the Cray systems.

Russ's rationale below is the big reason.

> 
>> But I very much feel the table would be easier to read this way:
> 
> [...]
> 
>> Than I would this:
> 
>>              1         2         3         4         5         6         7         8
>>     12345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890
> 
>>     Left      Right      Description and pseudocode
>>     ===============================================================
>>     Any       undef      check whether Any is undefined
>>                    like: !defined Any
> 
> I actually prefer the second one even with a wide window because my eyes
> don't get lost during carriage return.  But that may just be me.
> 
> One thing that's worth remembering when it comes to going to longer line
> widths is that while most people have the screen real estate to do this
> these days with average fonts, there are a fair number of people with
> minor or moderate eye problems that make "average" fonts pretty
> unappealing and annoying, or even unreadable.  And the first example made
> the "Like" column mostly unuseful if one can't widen the screen.  (Forced
> line wrapping on a narrow screen isn't *too* bad for text, but it makes
> code almost impossible to follow, at least for me.)
> 

+1 on behalf of those of us with aging eyes.

-- 
Peter Karman  .  http://peknet.com/  .  [email protected]