Subject: Re[2]: Bird #5

From: Will Hobbs <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Dec 93 16:42:07 PST

Due to the amount of e-mail traffic that everyone engages in, along with 
printer defaults that truncate longer lines, I think the 80 column 
limitiation is very much alive.  I vote for human-readability and a 
continuation of 80 column restriction.

Will

Should we be so quick to dismiss 80 column limitations or encouraged 
styles.  Most "default" window sizes still come up as 80 characters; most 
screen fonts are still mono-spaced and support this paradigm.  Printing of 
unformatted text files always still defaults to 10 pt mono-spaced fonts
(even on many postscript systems) and only allow 72-80 characters across per 
page.  Although the source of the size (80 characters) actually pre-dates 
even punched cards, it is still prevalent IF you desire human-readable and 
easily processable "documentation".

The real question seems to be whether we desire human readable files.  We can 
change it to a style issue only if we remove the "newline" (carriage return 
or whatever; depending on the file system) as an active part of the syntax.

randy

> From [email-masked] Thu Dec  9 13:14:27 1993 
> To: [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: Bird #5
>
> Howdy,
>
> As far as I'm concerned there is no reason to confine a line 
> to 80 characters. That's an ancient restriction born of
> punched-cards that I think we can safely ignore. 
>
> Chris
>
>