[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Zygo Blaxell) writes: > "Why 78 characters per line of code?" > "Because the laser printer wants that." > "Why does the laser printer want that?" > "Uhhh...because IBM made a business decision in the 1950's?"
I will actually point out that although the exact number 80 is arbitrary, the general number "about 80" is not. The issue is that that's the number of characters/line that looks good to the human eye - typesetters know this; open a book and count. Too much longer than that (say, 200 columns) and it becomes difficult when tracking your eye all the way back to the left to find the right row. This is remembered vaguely from an introduction I saw once to writing (I think) LaTeX style files, talking about classic beginner mistakes. Short lines are good. Of course, I suppose one could then say "but code lines that stick out past the 80th column are mostly indentation - your eye is only tracking back 40 characters". Well, that's true, but the eye tracking issue does help to explain why a printer (designed, most likely, for printing text that's not mostly indentation) would pick some number near 80 as its line length