On 29 July 2013 22:18, Skip Montanaro <s...@pobox.com> wrote: > 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. >
In that gauge I would exclude indentation (you don't count the number of characters the margin takes) and would point out that programming doesn't have generically-wrapped lines -- sometimes the wrapping of a line is more distracting than its length. Written text has a completely different flow to programs; written text is read sequentially where missing the reading of words is a trivial and oft occurrence whereas programming is highly structured.
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