: On 18 October 2012 11:55, Den <patents...@gmail.com> wrote: > [...] I'm amused by the whole question, and others related > to PEP8. A quick aside, the width of our roads all go back to the > width of a two horse rig. The suggested maximum of 80 characters goes > back to teletype machines, and IBM cards, and character based > terminals [...]
... and the decisions made back in the day about line length on teletypes etc. were informed [perhaps unconsciously] by the rules of printed literature - and *those* rules have a *lot* of accumulated wisdom behind them. Robert Bringhurst's Elements of Typographical Style is very good on that stuff; one thing he points out is that, at root, what's comfortable is defined by the size of the human hand, the distance we hold a book from our eye, etc. ... and while we still live in a world composed of physical objects, a lot of that gut feeling about what's comfortable carries across into the digital world. The accepted rule in print is that lines of prose should be between 45 and 90 characters, with 66 being ideal for readability. Code is not prose, and the combination of fixed-width and much more variable line length aids readability, but however it came about, ~80 does seem to more or less work as a limit. I'm pretty slavish about adhering to PEP 8 these days. Programmers are an opinionated bunch, and we all, given the opportunity, will come up with our own set of obviously [goddammit] correct rules. Having a broadly sensible, authoritative set of guidelines that we grudgingly agree to follow makes working with other coders easier IMO. -[]z. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list