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Re: PEP8 79 char max

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  Re: PEP8 79 char max Joshua Landau <joshua@landau.ws> - 2013-07-29 23:07 +0100

#51510 — Re: PEP8 79 char max

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On 29 July 2013 22:18, Skip Montanaro <skip@pobox.com> wrote:

> For the purposes of limiting the length you need to scan between first
> and last column, I would recommend leaving the recommended line length
> to ~ 80 columns.
>
> Just for grins, I grabbed a non-computer book, Atul Gawande's
> "Checklist Manifesto," from the pile on my desk and counted the number
> of characters in a full-width line.  70.  Then I grabbed my copy of
> "Mastering Regular Expressions" and counted the number of characters
> in a full-width line of text which also included a few special
> characters.  80.
>
> I think the history of printing offers a good gauge for the useful
> limits to line length.  After all, print publishers have been at this
> for more than a few years.
>
> As I typed this, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>
> > No, it is irrelevant to performance, except performance of the reader.
>
> Whose performance, I would argue is most important.
>
> I would like to hear of books meant to be read with page or column
> widths of 100 or more characters.  I suspect they would be few and far
> between.
>

In that gauge I would exclude indentation (you don't count the number of
characters the margin takes) and would point out that programming doesn't
have generically-wrapped lines -- sometimes the wrapping of a line is more
distracting than its length. Written text has a completely different flow
to programs; written text is read sequentially where missing the reading of
words is a trivial and oft occurrence whereas programming is highly
structured.

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