For the purposes of limiting the length you need to scan between first and last column, I would recommend leaving the recommended line length to ~ 80 columns.
Just for grins, I grabbed a non-computer book, Atul Gawande's "Checklist Manifesto," from the pile on my desk and counted the number of characters in a full-width line. 70. Then I grabbed my copy of "Mastering Regular Expressions" and counted the number of characters in a full-width line of text which also included a few special characters. 80. I think the history of printing offers a good gauge for the useful limits to line length. After all, print publishers have been at this for more than a few years. As I typed this, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > No, it is irrelevant to performance, except performance of the reader. Whose performance, I would argue is most important. I would like to hear of books meant to be read with page or column widths of 100 or more characters. I suspect they would be few and far between. Skip -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
