[ofa-general] Re: Merging of completely unreviewed drivers

David Newall davidn at davidnewall.com
Fri Feb 22 06:25:03 PST 2008


Bart Van Assche wrote:
> There is a reason to limit line length: scientific research has shown
> that readability of regular texts is optimal for a line length between
> 55 and 65 characters.

Putting aside the point that we're talking code, not regular text, I've
heard that said before and I don't think it's quite like that.  Perhaps
the numbers you said might assume various things such as the width of
the eye's field of view, the distance to the image and the size of each
character?


>  My experience is that the readability of source
> code decreases when the lines are very long (more than 160
> characters).

The point is that the width, excluding leading and trailing white space,
is what really matters.  Even deeply indented code can be a snap to
understand if you don't have to fight artificial line breaks.  And we've
got a much wider -- and taller! -- space available than we had in the
old 80x24 (and 80x1) days.



More information about the general mailing list