On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 2:04 PM, John de la Garza <john@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > It seems like you assuming the limit is based on terminal size? Hmm, I thought it was because of 80 column punch cards and ancient printers that didn't wrap. > There is some research in typography that suggests that it is easier > to read text that is not on long lines. Developers don't actually read most of the code seen, over time our eyes become trained to rapidly scan for patterns. We've invented lots of tools like cscope, ctags, lxr, and grep to further keep us from having to actually read much code at all. Your editor doesn't have soft wrap? > Newspapers have a large > sheet of paper but they use short columns. Yeah, short columns with chaotic white-space. The text fills the column width and is both left and right justified. I doubt anyone does "text-align: justify;" to their code editor. Who still reads newspapers? The 2 people still using punch cards? > My display is frequently greater than 80 col. I see this as an > opertunity to have two xterms next to each other, not to have lines > that are longer. Do you hear yourself? "Oh, my eyes, my eyes, I can't be bothered to read code so far out to the right, it burns, it burns!" Or "I can read two lines of code in two different files from two different contexts, but I cannot be bothered to read one longer line from a single file from a single context. I can multitask all day, but I cannot ever single-task, forget that drama!". All I'm saying is since no one adheres to it religiously, and the fact that I've seen many times maintainers telling people to just ignore it, the 80 character checkpatch warning is pointless. Given that it really comes down to a per-case best effort attempt, just set an 80 column indicator in your editor and try to stay within it, if you can. Keeping the checkpatch 80 character warning around is just academic masturbation. -- Greg Donald _______________________________________________ Kernelnewbies mailing list Kernelnewbies@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.kernelnewbies.org/mailman/listinfo/kernelnewbies
