Hi, On Tue, Jun 01, 2010 at 11:39:42AM +0200, Carl Fredrik Hammar wrote: > On Tue, Jun 01, 2010 at 03:52:59AM +0200, olafbuddenha...@gmx.net wrote: > > On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 05:59:09PM +0200, Carl Fredrik Hammar wrote:
> > > Break these two lines. Try to stick to less than 76 columns or > > > less than 80 if the reformatting changes lines that would > > > otherwise be unaffected. > > > > Why 76? > > It seems I'm missremembering. The number doesn't seem to be clearly > stated in the GNU Coding Standards, but indent --gnu uses 78. Keep in mind that this convention stems from a time where people actually used to *print* code, on a 80 column line printer... So it was important to strictly observe the limit back then. Nowadays, screens are large enough that a) nobody feels the urge to print out code, and b) nobody has a reason to stick to 80 columns when viewing on screen. Of course, very long lines can be hard to read; so depending on the content, breaking is still often advisable. However, there are many cases where breaking too soon adds nothing to readability, and even makes it worse. Pretty much all the cases you nagged about fall in this category IMHO... So unless there is a pedantic upstream who won't accept patches not strictly conforming to a fixed column number, I'm *strongly* against observing it too closely. -antrik-
