On Mon, 2006-08-21 at 08:45 -0700, Chip Salzenberg wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 21, 2006 at 10:48:59AM -0400, Will Coleda wrote:
> > The way you phrase the question, you're not going to get any of these
> > answers. Who is programming parrot on their *physical* VT100? =-).
> > The primary reason for an 80 column limit is developer convenience, I
> > think.
>
> Well, that's fair. Many of us are old enough to have used such limited
> hardware, but it's all surely been relegated to the trashheap by now. So:
> Would anyone be inconvenienced by exceeding 80 columns regularly; and, how?
I typically measure my screen real estate in discrete 80-col units. My
layout of terminals, editors (emacs, xemacs, vim and gvim mixed fairly
liberally for different purposes) and other applications is suited to
editing in 80-column units. When I have to re-size a window to larger
than that, it's a pain, but not a terribly hurtful one.
I like the Gnome Style document for reference here. They talk about
8-space tabs, but it's the same issue as 80-column text:
Using 8-space tabs for indentation provides a number of
benefits. It makes the code easier to read, since the
indentation is clearly marked. It also helps you keep your code
honest by forcing you to split functions into more modular and
well-defined chunks - if your indentation goes too far to the
right, then it means your function is designed badly and you
should split it to make it more modular or re-think it.
Just my $0.02.
> > P.S.: Seems only fair that if we're sticking with C89, we stick with
> > 1989 terminal sizes. =-)
>
> Some selectivity is in order, or we'll have to target 1989 memory sizes,
> disk capacities, and network bandwidth....
There are times that I use emacs, not because it's the right tool for
the job that *it* is doing, but because I have to use it over a lossy
line, and NOTHING that I've found squeezes quite so much out of
curses-like rendering over a slow line. Why? Because it was designed to
do multi-window editing over 1200-9600 bps modem lines without making
its users want to kill themselves.
There is something to be said for working well in low-resource
environments, especially when talking about a VM that might need to be
placed into the control circuitry of, say, an elevator control system.
