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From: Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Which code style do you prefer the most?
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2025 18:13:05 +0100
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On 26.02.2025 17:32, David Brown wrote:
> On 26/02/2025 15:39, Bradley K. Sherman wrote:
>> Just do your best to keep it neat and under 80 columns.
>>
> 
> Neat, yes.  80 columns, no - unless you are living in the previous century.

That's the typical response of someone who obviously doesn't care. :-/

> 
> Lines that are too long are hard to read, but the idea that 80 columns
> is a good number or should be a hard limit is /long/ outdated.  About
> 100 - 120 columns is a better fit for a lot of code, letting you use
> sensible identifiers without excessively splitting logical lines into
> multiple physical lines.

This sounds more reasonable. :-)

But it depends. - Whether 80, 120, 180, or 240 are the holy grail?
From own experience a few observations...
In Java projects I've seen prevalently extreme long identifiers,
which result in extreme long lines; often hardly readable.
From typesetting we know that long lines are bad to read; why are
the newspaper columns so narrow?
Long lines are even worse to read if you use sans-serif fonts;
too bad that such bad fonts are dominating our modern world, and
especially in the IT ("thanks" MS for fostering Arial, etc.);
using less columns is also often advantageous here to compensate
the reduced legibility.
Don't expect that everyone has a screen as big as yours; that is
the case in companies but also in other places or projects where
code is shared or where people work together.

Myself I have the habit to take an 80 column screen as baseline,
organize my source code in that frame. But that's no credo; the
purpose is just to not let the lines get too long "by accident".
I then wrap the code at sensible places with indentation. And if
_some_ lines get longer, say your 100 or 120 columns, that's no
problem as long as the overall readability is still guaranteed.

Again, preferences vary, here as well.

Janis