Paul Eggert wrote: > On 10/04/10 06:49, Eric Blake wrote: >> Lines less than 80 columns are nicer in my opinion, and we might as well >> do that whether or not -Wcolumns is in effect when the end result looks >> nicer. > > The message I'm getting back from all this is that > I shouldn't have wasted everybody's time on this topic.
On the contrary. I like the line-shortening changes, and especially the new syntax-check. We can exempt the long URL and any other exceptions people require. Letting lines longer than 80 columns slip into code that we have to review is a problem for several reasons, not least of which is that it makes it far too easy to miss differences in the tail end of wrapped lines. Sure, that's a low-probability event, but bugs in general are low-probability (at least that's the hope), and we should do what we can to minimize that probability. Re 80-columns. All of my terminals are 80 or 81 columns wide, and while it's "easy" to enlarge a terminal, I do it so rarely that it might as well be "never". Then there's the issue of side-by-side diffs and 3-way merges. 3 * 80 is 240 columns. If you have a 1900+-wide pixel monitor or good eyes and a small font, that's no problem, but on a smaller screens or with larger fonts, you will be hard-pressed to fit three non-overlapping 90- or 100-column windows.
