Is 78 characters still a good option? Was: [Haskell-cafe] breaking too long lines

[Jason Dusek]

  Some material I've read on typography -- can't find the
  reference now -- suggests ~65 is the best number of characters
  per line. The advice was, if your page is larger than that,
  you should make columns.

  If someone has done some studies with specifically program
  text, I'd of course be really interested to know what they
  discovered; but I really do suspect the issue of line length
  is more about having a convention than having the best one.
  Would people who prefer, for example, 132 character lines
  switch to 66 if that were empirically the best? Probably not.

  The 80 column convention sets a clear expectation for all of
  us; it's not a matter of what anyone likes.

--
Jason Dusek