RFC: style cleanup & guidelines for GHC, and related bikeshedding

[Johan Tibell]

On Thu, Jul 17, 2014 at 8:40 AM, Simon Peyton Jones
<simonpj at microsoft.com> wrote:
> | I used to be a 80 column guy, but moved away from that the last years.
> | But you are right, there must be an upper limit and, if >80 is a
> | problem for code reviews, then it's a reasonable choice.
>
> As laptop screens have successively more horizontal pixels and fewer vertical pixels, longer lines use screen real estate better.  80 columns now seems a bit narrow to me.  100 would be better.
>
> But I'm not going to die for this

Here we go!

 * Wider screens let you have several Emacs buffers next to each
other. At 80 chars you can have about 2 buffers next to each other on
a 13" screen.

 * The average line length is about 30-35 characters in Python. If
it's anything similar in Haskell shorter line length are more
efficient, looking how much of the lines times columns space is filled
with characters.

 * The eye has trouble traveling back to the next line if lines get
too long (at least when reading prose). Research says around 60-70
characters is optimal, if I recall correctly.