wren ng thornton <w...@freegeek.org> wrote: > There is a deeper reason. Much work in typography has shown > that humans read text best when it's around 76 > characters wide; if things get narrower than that then > cohesion is lost, if things get wider then it takes a long > time to acquire the beginning of the next line.
My impression of the research is that it isn't nearly so conclusive. See [1] for a brief survey of findings for online reading speed/comprehension and a relatively recent study. The results are all over the place. Nevertheless, your later point - code /= text, is key. I'd expect there's a study that focuses on code, though I don't have one at my fingertips. I imagine reading speed for code is overall much lower than for natural language, which I expect is an important factor affecting eye movement. I'd also guess that reading patterns are quite different -- scanning backward or forward to find a definition, etc. It's different enough that I'd discount research focusing on natural language text as being relevant. [1] http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/72/LineLength.asp _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
