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Is the 80 Columns Limit Dead?
Dancing Primate asks: "Reading through the code of co-workers and various open source projects, I'm finding that people are no longer formatting their code to 80 columns. With most people using X and the wide range of non-vi editors, is the 80 column limitation disappearing? Am I the only one who gets grumpy when I do a diff or print code, and it's hard to read?"
I know in a lot of my coding classes at U of T they required no more than 80 characters on a line, lest you get some hefty mark deductions. I dont stick to it for my stuff tho i usually limit it to when my screen starts scrolling to the right....
Because of the way that people name their methods and variables now (int IHaveToDoABunchOfNiftyStuffHere( INT nThisIsAReallyImportantInt ) ) 80 columns isn't particularily feasible. That said, I don't understand why people don't just standardize on a column width and stick with it. When I first started working here, I tried to work within 80 columns, but my coworkers hated it when I reformatted their code, and I hated it when they touched mine. Now I format to 132 columns, and nobody really notices when I reformat their code to fit.
All the important stuff happens at the END of the line. It's where the actual methods get called and the work gets done. Seeing the beginning the line is usually entirely meaningless, and I hate scrolling to have to see the end of the line at 160 characters. I've already got my hands on the keyboard, and the mouse isn't a tool that I can use to input code, so it's just a waste of my time to put my hand on it. Most editors even indent and format the code pretty nicely if you manually break the line in a language like C or C++ which don't care about whitespace.
It doesn't really matter what the column width is as long as
1) Everyone sticks to it
2) You don't have to scroll to see the end of the line.