Two-Dimensional Expression Layout

[Lawrence D’Oliveiro]

On Friday, August 19, 2016 at 8:56:31 PM UTC+12, I wrote:
> To avoid lines getting long, why not take advantage of the two available
> screen/page dimensions to make [expression] structure clearer?

Another aspect of this has to do with line length. I regularly set my editor window width to around 100 columns. But if you exclude indentation whitespace, my lines are usually much shorter than that.

There is a limit to the length of text lines that a human reader can cope with (which is why newspapers, for example, tend to have a many-column layout). Using two-dimensional layout and indentation helps to keep the (non-whitespace) line length within reasonable limits.