On 05/09/2016 03:29 PM, Paul Smith wrote: > On Mon, 2016-05-09 at 14:17 -0400, Brad King wrote: >>> Where does 79 come from? >> >> That has been CMake's limit for a long time. Since we're changing the >> style anyway we might as well go with the more common 80 chars > > Not to say whether or not this should be changed, but FYI the 79 comes > from this set of facts: > > * Traditional terminals are 80 chars wide > * Editors and viewers that do line-wrapping use the last character of > the line to specify whether there was a wrap, otherwise you can't > tell if the line is wrapped or there's a newline.
Thanks, Paul. Good explanation of the historical reason. I tend to agree, but I wonder why this has not caused any of the standard styles clang-format provides (Mozilla, Google, LLVM, etc.) to adopt 79 characters instead of 80. Maybe it is just that the width limit is now more about supporting side-by-side diff views or multiple terminal splits without using the entire monitor width for viewing a source file with long lines. It also helps avoid excessive eye movement horizontally while reading code. The difference between 79 and 80 characters for these purposes is negligible. Only a small fraction of lines should end up near this limit so I do not think readability will change much between 79 and 80 chars. Therefore I propose that we go back to 79 characters for the above reasons. It will also help `git diff` views fit in 80 chars even with the left `+/-` column. This brings us to: --- # This configuration requires clang-format 3.8 or higher. BasedOnStyle: Mozilla AlignOperands: false AlwaysBreakAfterReturnType: None AlwaysBreakAfterDefinitionReturnType: None ColumnLimit: 79 Standard: Cpp03 ... -Brad -- Powered by www.kitware.com Please keep messages on-topic and check the CMake FAQ at: http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/CMake_FAQ Kitware offers various services to support the CMake community. For more information on each offering, please visit: CMake Support: http://cmake.org/cmake/help/support.html CMake Consulting: http://cmake.org/cmake/help/consulting.html CMake Training Courses: http://cmake.org/cmake/help/training.html Visit other Kitware open-source projects at http://www.kitware.com/opensource/opensource.html Follow this link to subscribe/unsubscribe: http://public.kitware.com/mailman/listinfo/cmake-developers
