79 chars or more?

[AK]

On 08/17/2010 12:26 AM, James Mills wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 2:12 PM, AK<andrei.avk at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> There's no doubt that there are pro's and con's, but to be fair, it's
>> not like code becomes unreadable over 79 chars - the difference is that
>> when your terminal is 80 chars, it's less convenient for you to read
>> code that's wider and when your terminal is wider, it's less convenient
>> to read code that's 79 chars.
>
> I guess there are two-sides to the coin here so to speak. See I'm
> vision impaired
> so I prefer a 79 char width in my own projects and expect those that work
> with me to use the same standards (stick to project standards as Steven says).
>
> The other side is this... I'm of the opinion that if you're writing a
> line of code
> that's excessively long (>80char or say>100chars), then you might want to
> reconsider what you're doing :) (It might be wrong).

I stay away from ugly cramped one-liners; I mostly run over 79 when I
have a few `and` and `or` clauses or long strings. I've also noticed
something interesting: going from 79 to 99 affects a relatively large
number of lines, but going over 99 (i.e. 99 to 132) is much, much rarer.

By the way, the reason I asked is that we're working on a python
tutorial and I realized that even though I'm used to 99, I wasn't sure
if it's ok to teach that to new users or not..

   -andrei