[Haskell-beginners] Re: Compiling C into Haskell

[Thomas Davie]

On 16 Apr 2010, at 07:05, Juan Pedro Bolivar Puente wrote:

> I am going a bit off-topic here...
> 
>> 
>> PS. Could you limit length of line to 72-80 characters? Thank you in
>> advance.
>> 
> 
> Please, don't impose others how to format their email. There is an
> interesting reasoning in favor of not breaking lines in email: it is
> better for accessibility, because of how screen-readers for visually
> impaired people work. I will quote a message by the accessibility expert
> Chris Hofstader:
> 
>> I forgot to mention that, when using a screen reader, many  users try to maximize their line width so, if reading by line, they can often get an entire paragraph with a single down arrow rather than reading through superfluously narrow lines which have two problems:  1. they require more keystrokes which 2. break up a user's concentration as the flow of sentences are broken up by needing to take action a every few words.
>> 
> 
> And what is the universally best length of line anyway? I have also seen
> people sending emails with really thin columns that get annoying to
> read... If you feel bad about emails sent with long lines, just enable
> text wrapping in your email reader.
> 
> And yes, I wrap the text in my email because I know there are many
> people like you, but maybe this message will help us in being more
> tolerant about how others use their tools --I did not know about these
> accessibility issues a few months ago neither!

Re your last paragraph, please don't (not that I mean to impose this upon you).

My final reason to add is that once an email is replied to sufficiently many times, limiting yourself to 72-80 characters can cause major problems:

This line:
12345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890

Will commonly become:
> 123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678
90
Which will become:
> > 1234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456
78
> 90
etc.

Not only is this annoying, but it's irrecoverable too.  There is no way to tell which new lines are some one adding hard wrapping to an email, and which are actual intentional newlines.

All this, simply because one user couldn't enable the softwrap option in their email reader.

Bob