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From: ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: IBM, sonic delay lines, and the history of the 80x24 display
Date: 30 Apr 2024 15:55:04 GMT
Organization: Stefan Ram
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Expires: 1 Feb 2025 11:59:58 GMT
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Ben Collver <bencollver@tilde.pink> wrote or quoted:
>One Retrocomputing StackExchange answer claims that terminals with
>72-character lines show "the struggle for 80 characters", with
>72-character terminals falling short of the 80-character goal.
>However, 72-character lines were a deliberate choice to capture the
>lucrative Teletype market; teleprinters such as the Teletype Model 33
>printed 72-character lines. (The model number of the Datapoint 3300
>(1969), for instance, reflects the Teletype Model 33.)

  Raymond Hettinger (transcribed, shortened and partially paraphrased
  by me [Stefan Ram]):

|The line-width part of PEP 8 bugs me.
|
|You have to wrap your commits in seventy-two characters. You have 
|to end your lines at seventy-nine characters.
|
|One time it bugs me is when I'm writing unit tests.
|
|When I write unit tests, I have to start with a class, and then
|inside the class there's a "def" for tests, and then the test
|starts with a "self.assertEqual", and by then most of my line 
|is gone. So by the time I get to any business logic in my test, 
|I'm near the end of the line.
|
|If I go over seventy-nine characters, somebody will come and
|PEP 8 me.
|
|They'll come in and say: "Oh, Raymond's line hit eighty-one
|characters, I'm going to PEP 8 it!". And so, while I'm not
|looking, they come in and reformat my code.
|
|They'll just throw a line break at a really awkward place.
|
|Does that make the code better?
|
|So, to escape that pressure, I think: Maybe I can just commit 
|a little atrocity and that way no one will ever come and PEP 8 me. 
|I'll just shorten my variable names.
|
|Does that make the code better?
|
freely adapted from Raymond Hettinger