PEP8 79 char max

[Skip Montanaro]

> Well, what I interpret as the PEP8 79 is chars visible minus the '\n' or '\r\n'(which would be 2; 81) line enders.

You young un's. Always makin' stuff up... :-)

In these days of fancy single-user PCs with sophisticated window
systems, people tend to forget that BITD there was a thriving market
for serially-connected terminals (most only had 80 columns and 24
rows) connected to timesharing machines of various kinds (DEC VAX and
PDP-11 machines were extremely common in the Unix world). Many (some?
most? all?) of those terminals had a "feature" where if a character
was displayed in column 80, the cursor would automatically wrap around
and blink mindlessly in column 1 of the next row. That was even more
unpleasant behavior if you happened to enter text in the last column
of the last row, as then your cursor would blink in row 1, column 1. I
think there is a termcap code that specifies whether or not a given
terminal exhibits this behavior.

Hence 79.

/etc/termcap on my OpenSuSE system has over 1600 entries, most for
terminals which were resigned to the junk heap decades ago. Today, we
can probably just get by with entries for a couple xterm or ansi
variants.

And thank goodness for SIGWINCH. :-)

Skip