[Python-ideas] 80 character line width vs. something wider

[Carl Johnson]

Curt Hagenlocher wrote:

> You can't always control the names you're working with. In our case,
> we're writing .NET-based code that uses a lot types originally defined
> in C#. The standard in C#-land tends to be much more verbose than in
> Python, and definitely presents some challenges when trying to keep
> lines under 80 chars. I imagine that Jython code has a similar issue
> when interoperating with Java.

That's true. It's also a problem for people doing Cocoa with PyObjC.

But who cares? If you want to break PEP8 for your own project, there's
nothing to stop you. The only thing that PEP8 is binding on is what
gets checked into the cpython source, and, for obvious reasons, that
doesn't interact with C#-stuff or JVM-stuff or Cocoa-stuff to any
significant degree.

I'm not sure what the point of this debate is. If you want to use 500
chars per line, the interpreter won't complain. If you want to say
that using more than 80 chars per line would make the cpython source
read better, I would have to respectfully disagree. So, what's the
problem?