Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2003 12:07:31 -0500 From: David Cuthbert <dacut@kanga.org> To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: C coding editor Message-ID: <3E5F9753.3090103@kanga.org> In-Reply-To: <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> <3E5F82CF.FCE0CB4C@mindspring.com>
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Terry Lambert wrote: > 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-). Different concepts. The Bell Labs study dealt with (long term) memory and the ability to remember a string of unrelated items. This is more analagous to sentence lengths in English or function size in C. The n characters/line issue deals more with the ability to visually track the line. If, for example, when you reach the end of the line you often find yourself accidentally reading the same line again, then the line is too wide. Or something to that effect. I'm not an HCI expert, so... >>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-). Heh... for every example where it works/is needed, I can find 10 examples in our code at work where it definitely *isn't* needed. :-) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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