Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2003 07:39:59 -0800 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: David Cuthbert <dacut@kanga.org> Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: C coding editor Message-ID: <3E5F82CF.FCE0CB4C@mindspring.com> References: <20030221122103.GA2073@asterix.local> <3E5A4264.2010801@millions.ca> <3E5A4BA9.5010700@mitre.org> <200302260841.40693.wes@softweyr.com> <3E5EF568.4040800@kanga.org>
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David Cuthbert wrote: > 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. Average English word length is 5 characters; with a space, that's 6 characters. 65 characters is therefore 11 words. The Bell Labs study which set telephone number length limits at 7 digits found that the average person could keep between 5 and 9 items in memory at a time. I guess "11 words" isn't out of the question, but it's a bit long. 8-) 8-). However... that does mean that something with a shorter average length is going to limit the desirable maximum line length even further, if your purpose is "better human comprehension". > 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...) Seems to have worked well for tcp_input(). 8-) 8-). > > 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. Proportional fonts are much slower reading than non-proportional; it is also harder to get the clock marks in the paper tape, punch cards, and printer spacing charts to line up correctly. 8^p. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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