Re: [Ocaml-lib-devel] 80-chars limit

[Nicolas C. <war...@fr...>]

> On Sun, 05 Oct 2003, Nicolas Cannasse wrote:
> > I agree that short lines are better but I dislike to break some code
into
> > several expressions (or shorten identifier name or other tricks) only to
> > stick to that outdated 80 chars limit.
>
> It's outdated in the sense that our displays and printers can handle
> better than this. The question is whether humans can. Enforcing this
> (or another) limit keeps people from writing unreadable spaghetti code.
> Unless you use extremely long identifiers, which should be discouraged
> in any case, 80 chars should be more than enough.

Not a flame, but just some comments about that :
I just don't like such arbitrary rules made in the name of "protecting the
programmer from writing bad code". I mean, if a programmer is actually that
bad then he will write unreadable code no matter the chars limit :-)
Depending on the programming language, on the ident size and naming
conventions, and many others factors such as the programmer own style of
programming, this limit can vary a lot. Fixing it to 80 chars is nonsense.
Just let the programmer have his own judgement on the code readability he's
been writing.

Nicolas Cannasse