Who is still using a 1980's tty for coreboot development?
On Fri, May 25, 2018 at 10:15:02AM +0200, Patrick Georgi via coreboot wrote:
That is, who would unbearably suffer from 132 characters per line of code?
It's not just about the truly old setups with terminals that can't show longer lines. I, for example, often have two windows of about 90 characters side by side, so I am in favor of the classic 80 column limit.
That said, maybe the limit should just be enforced less stringently in cases where breaking a line doesn't help readability; for example when there's a long string that can't fit within that limit, but also when there's a table-like structure in the code where two lines of 80 characters per entry clearly makes it less readable than one line of 120 characters per entry.
Another point to consider is that a limited line length penalizes complexity (because indentation takes up space, too), which might be a good thing. To quote from the Linux kernel coding style[1]:
Now, some people will claim that having 8-character indentations makes the code move too far to the right, and makes it hard to read on a 80-character terminal screen. The answer to that is that if you need more than 3 levels of indentation, you’re screwed anyway, and should fix your program.
Enough bike shedding from me, Jonathan Neuschäfer
[1]: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/coding-style.html#indentation