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Postings from March 2022
On Sat, Feb 19, 2022, at 10:24 AM, demerphq wrote: > Perl core development has long recommended and/or required that we stick the "traditional" line length of less than 80 characters. We have tests which enforce this. This line length made sense in the early days when terminals were text based and where this was the maximum they COULD display. In the intervening time monitors have improved and nobody uses text based screens anymore. Screens are much wider than they are high these days, and can display far more lines of text than they used to. Even with a large font on a laptop the maximum width is far closer to 130 than it is to 80. On linux a decent terminal will have support for 132x43 for example. I had a quick look into the "we have tests". I made a clumsy attempt to find them. We have some about the length of lines in Pod, but I didn't find anything about the C source. Is it possible that you were mistaken on this point? Anyway: I think there are probably two parts to the actual current standard: 1. perlhack.pod says "Try hard to not exceed 79-columns" 2. reviewers might sometimes say "I think you could try harder" If I'm correct, and there's nothing more than that which enforces this, I am happy to propose a text change that says something *like*: "In general, we target 80 column lines. When sticking to 80 columns would lead to torturous code or rework, it's fine to go longer. Try to keep your excess past 80 to a minimum." You'd mentioned doing the retooling, but my question is: what tooling *is* there on this front? Thanks! -- rjbsThread Previous | Thread Next