too many lines too long

[Richard Eisenberg]

At both school and at home I can fit 3 80-character buffers side by side, at a comfortable font size. Going up (even to 85 cols) would mean losing a buffer. (Or straining my eyes.) Of course I can deal with wrapped lines. But I still vote for 80 characters as a target, while allowing people wiggle room to miss this target.

The number 80 is with us for historical reasons, but I know I'm not the only one who still routinely uses 80-column buffers.

Richard

On Nov 9, 2015, at 5:45 PM, Simon Peyton Jones <simonpj at microsoft.com> wrote:

> In my view 80 chars is too short.  It was justified in the days of 80-column CRTs, but that just isn't a restriction any more.   I routinely edit in a much wider window.
> 
> Clearly there's a judgement call here.  But I'd prefer 120 cols say.
> 
> Simon
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ghc-devs [mailto:ghc-devs-bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of Richard Eisenberg
> Sent: 09 November 2015 21:03
> To: ghc-devs Devs <ghc-devs at haskell.org>
> Subject: too many lines too long
> 
> Hi devs,
> 
> We seem to be uncommitted to the ideal of 80-character lines. Almost every patch on Phab I look through has a bunch of "line too long" lint errors. No one seems to do much about these. And Phab's very very loud indication of a lint error makes reviewing the code harder.
> 
> I like the ideal of 80-character lines. I aim for this ideal in my patches, falling short sometimes, of course. But I think the current setting of requiring everyone to "explain" away their overlong lines during `arc diff` and then trying hard to ignore the lint errors during code review is wrong. And it makes us all inured to more serious lint errors.
> 
> How about this: after `arc diff` is run, it will count the number of overlong lines before and after the patch. If there are more after, have the last thing `arc diff` outputs be a stern telling-off of the dev, along the lines of
> 
>> Before your patch, 15 of the edited lines were over 80 characters.
>> Now, a whopping 28 of them are. Can't you do better? Please?
> 
> Would this be ignored more or followed more? Who knows. But it would sure be less annoying. :)
> 
> What do others think?
> 
> Thanks,
> Richard
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