PEP8 79 char max

[Joshua Landau]

On 30 July 2013 16:44, Skip Montanaro <skip at pobox.com> wrote:

> > So if everyone basically follows PEP8 we all benefit from playing by
> > the same game rules, as it were.
>
> (I think I'm agreeing with you, but nonetheless, I will forge ahead.)
>
> To the extent that 80-column window widths have been common for so
> long, PEP 8 or not (and Python or not), there is a ton of code out
> there which abides by that convention.  More-or-less unilaterally
> increasing the recommended max line width to 100 (or 99?) columns
> isn't likely to improve things.  People like me (who prefer the status
> quo) will complain about all the new-fangled code written to a wider
> standard (and will be tempted to reformat).  People who like the new
> standard will complain about old code wasting all that white space
> (and will be tempted to reformat). :-)
>
> Finally (I promise this is my last word on the topic), most lines
> don't need to be wrapped as they stand today.  See the attached graph
> for the distribution of line lengths for the current project where I
> spend most of my time these days (just Python code, blank lines
> elided, comment lines included).  Stretching the max out to 100
> columns when most lines are less than 60 columns just wastes screen
> real estate.
>

Your graph doesn't convince me.

Take this line from earlier, which is currently 102 characters and nearing
my personal limit.

    completer = completer.Completer(bindings=[r'"\C-xo": overwrite-mode',
r'"\C-xd": dump-functions'])

Under rules to wrap to 80 characters (and in this case I'd probably do it
anyway), I'd normally wrap to this:

    completer = completer.Completer(bindings=[
  r'"\C-xo": overwrite-mode',
  r'"\C-xd": dump-functions'
    ])

of line lengths 46, 36, 35 and 6 respectively. Thus it's impossible to so
easily tell how many lines would be "unwrapped" from your graph.
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