On 1/6/2014 7:38 PM, L. David Baron wrote: > I tend to think that we should either: > * stick to 80 > * require no wrapping, meaning that comments must be one paragraph > per line, boolean conditions must all be single line, and assume > that people will deal, using an editor that handles such code > usefully
Since I'm seeing a lot of people advocating that the wrap margin should be 100, let me reiterate David Baron's comment that the wrap margin must either be 80 or infinite with a self-demonstrating response. I once suggested a wider wrap margin as a compromise years ago, but I have come around to the viewpoint that the only acceptable wrap margins are 80 and infinite. The absolute worst visual display to read is when you have text that contains a mixture of soft wraps (caused by lines longer than your display) with hard wraps (caused by a max-line-length requirement). The text in this post is set up to emulate the display of text that has a hard wrap at around the 100th character being displayed on an 80-character terminal window. Thus, this is the code that people using 80-character terminal windows will be subjected to in places that have heavy paragraph-style text (e.g., README files, documentation comments, or even really long regular comment blocks). Now, you can argue that people should just resize their windows to be <insert desired wrap margin here>. I suspect that many of the people making this arguments are people who use GUI editors that have 120+-character viewports for code, arguing for the ability to utilize what it is often just dead whitespace in their editor and frustrated that people using "older" technology are limiting use of this space. As one who uses 80-character terminals heavily, I can report that changing the size of the terminal is generally not a viable option. Many people who use smaller terminal sizes fill up the screen real estate by tiling the terminals. On smaller resolutions and larger font sizes, changing the screen size even to 100 makes it impossible to tile more than two windows horizontally on the screen: changing the screen size is impossible. Furthermore, the default size for a terminal has been decided on by universal convention to be 80x24: any would-be contributor to Mozilla who uses the default-sized terminals would be forced to either put up with the painful reading of poorly-wrapped lines or to figure out how to retool their entire workflow just to be able to contribute--and I suspect that many would instead find themselves driven away. Infinitely-long lines do not have the same problems that wrapping at any value > 80 does: most editors are capable of soft-wrapping them to some degree of legibility. The problem isn't that some lines have to be wrapped as much as it is that the lines are wrapped at completely wrong places. _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
