[Haskell-beginners] Re: Compiling C into Haskell

[Thomas Davie]

On 16 Apr 2010, at 08:20, Ertugrul Soeylemez wrote:

> Juan Pedro Bolivar Puente <magnicida at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> I am going a bit off-topic here...
> 
> Me too, but that's how mailing lists work. =)
> 
> 
>> 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.
> 
> The big problem is that some mail/news readers assume that lines are
> prebroken, especially when it comes to older terminal-based readers.

I'd highly recommend that you stop using such readers, or patch them to soft-wrap long lines, neither is difficult.

> This is bad, but it's the state of things.  Otherwise there is little
> reason to prebreak lines and many reasons not to do it.
> I think mail/news readers like Thunderbird go into the right direction
> by employing an additional header, which precisely specifies the line
> breaking behaviour used in the mail.  The actual text is prewrapped, but
> using the header newer readers can reconstruct the paragraphs and
> display them the way the user wishes.

Interesting, and useful sounding, though how does it tell the difference between a wrap at 80 characters and an intentional new line at 80 characters?

> In fact I would love if HTML mails would be more accepted in the open
> source community.  After all there is nothing bad about HTML and it
> would solve the above problem.  Most reasonings against it are related
> to compatibility or interoperability, which is no problem, because you
> can always add a text/plain part.

I suspect the only way this would solve the problem is by forcing people not to use broken email clients – you can't read an html email in an old email client, in the same way as you can't read a non-hard-wrapped email in an ancient email client.

Anyway, my basic point is that an email client that will not soft-wrap lines is fundamentally broken.  Emails can and do have lines longer than 80 characters, and a client that can't render them has a serious bug.  If your client is one of these, I suggest you either (a) move to a less buggy client, or (b) write a patch to fix the bug.  The correct solution though is not to enforce upon everyone else that they must write emails with a particular line length.

Bob