[Discuss] Line lengths (Re: Discuss Digest, Vol 109, Issue 2)

Dale R. Worley worley at alum.mit.edu
Tue Jun 2 21:10:25 EDT 2020


From: Jerry Feldman <gaf.linux at gmail.com>
> I go back to the key punch days when we used 80 column punch cards. I also

There's a bunch of stuff about the physiology of how people read.
Books, over history, have evolved to have lines of a particular length,
when they could have been printed in any proportion, because lines of a
certain length are easier to read.

I notice in the referenced article that Linus complains that 80 column
lines are bad for processing source through Unix utilities, not that
increasing line length would make things better for programmers.

Dale


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