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On Thu, Aug 1, 2013 at 8:31 AM, Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:

On 01/08/13 22:44, Nick Coghlan wrote:

4\. Lines up to 99 characters are now permitted (but 79 is still the
preferred limit)

�

Coincidentally, there was a discussion about line length on python-list over the last couple of days. I think the two most relevant comments are by Skip Montanaro:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2013-July/652977.html
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2013-July/653046.html

I believe there may be a relationship to the 7 plus or minus 2 (times 10)

of human conceptual limits.

Personally I find it very difficult to read text with long lines.

Historically two or three column (newspaper/book) with a barrier margin

was used to get much more text on the page, but still the reader had much

shorter "chunks" to absorb.

�

If I may be permitted to paraphrase:

\- publishers and printers have been dealing with readability of text for an awfully long time, and they pretty much all use a de facto standard of 70-80 characters per line;

\- most lines of code are short, stretching the max out to 100 characters when most lines are around 60 just ends up wasting screen real estate if your editor window is wide enough to deal with the max.

To that last point, I add: it's even worse if you keep the editor relatively narrow, since now you have a few lines that require horizontal scrolling, which is awful, or line-wrapping, neither of which are palatable.

\--
Steven

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