Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2003 00:36:40 -0500 From: David Cuthbert <dacut@kanga.org> To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: C coding editor Message-ID: <3E5EF568.4040800@kanga.org> In-Reply-To: <200302260841.40693.wes@softweyr.com> References: <20030221122103.GA2073@asterix.local> <3E5A4264.2010801@millions.ca> <3E5A4BA9.5010700@mitre.org> <200302260841.40693.wes@softweyr.com>
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Wes Peters wrote: > Seriously, limiting your programming for a lifetime to 80 columns > because you couldn't figure out how to make some grotty old dot > matrix printer do 8-point printing a decade ago really isn't all > that smart, is it? No, but I still find 80 columns to be a reasonable limit. The average person can comfortably track up to about 65 characters on a line in prose (or so I've been told from a study that was related to me from a forgotten source...). Given that there's more whitespace in code, it's probably a bit more. The 80 column limit can also encourage developers to keep their functions smaller and factor out common code. (I say can, because I've seen the six-levels-of-indentation-loops sadly all too often...) > I'm still disappointed at programming editors that can't make sense > of normal typefaces and have to be used with monospaced fonts. I've tried it, mainly to see what it looks like. Unfortunately, the delimiters that have a great deal of meaning in many languages (parens, braces, brackets, single quotes, etc.) end up being far too small for my eyes. For some reason, though, I've seen a lot of VHDL code typeset in books in proportional fonts, though usually with boldface highlighting of reserved words. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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