Path: csiph.com!v102.xanadu-bbs.net!xanadu-bbs.net!feeder.erje.net!eu.feeder.erje.net!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: polygonum Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: Re: The Tyranny of the Hollerith Punched Card Date: Sun, 08 Jun 2014 09:19:13 +0100 Organization: me Lines: 45 Message-ID: References: Reply-To: rmoudndgers@vrod.co.uk Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-15; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: individual.net eaof6AY+3lYGOfUtI3ZXzwl3gH7baigkYwmxaw3vZYL6vlVDc= Cancel-Lock: sha1:dPuVtuPOpJzUL8aU2l8Tekf4VW0= User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.5.0 In-Reply-To: Xref: csiph.com comp.misc:3555 On 08/06/2014 07:02, Rich wrote: > http://pub.gajendra.net/2012/09/hollerith_tyranny > > ... > > "Now fast-forward to the 21st century; a mere couple of thousand > years after Caesar. Look at your screen. How wide is your terminal > window or the text window of your editor? 80 columns? Yeah, I > thought so. Most people's are. And lots of coding standards in lots > of organizations mandate this. For example, here is an excerpt from > the Linux kernel coding style:" > > "The limit on the length of lines is 80 columns and this is a > strongly preferred limit." > > "Statements longer than 80 columns will be broken into sensible > chunks. Descendants are always substantially shorter than the > parent and are placed substantially to the right. The same > applies to function headers with a long argument list. Long > strings are as well broken into shorter strings. The only > exception to this is where exceeding 80 columns significantly > increases readability and does not hide information." > > "Granted, the Linux folks give one an escape hatch for when it would > be really problematic. But still ask yourself: why? Why 80 columns? > Why not 100, or 120, or 60?" > > ... > However, when real punched cards were in use, the content was frequently limited to 72 or fewer columns due to use of some columns for things such as sequence number. Cobol used the 1-6 for a line sequence number, 7 as a continuation mark, 8-11 for special purposes and 73 - 80 were for "program name" or other uses. So 80 editable columns already provides a wider area than we used to have. Also, Hollerith himself appears to have used many different column widths. The fundamental issue with using wider displays is when people view them expecting only 80 columns and miss the extra characters. Or find it awkward scrolling their viewer/editor for the exceptions. Or have to re-organise their take on windows to allow for the extra width. -- Rod