Messages in this thread | | | From | Alistair John Strachan <> | Subject | Re: 80 column line limit? | Date | Thu, 5 Jan 2006 23:02:09 +0000 |
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On Thursday 05 January 2006 13:02, Kay Sievers wrote: > Can't we relax the 80 column line rule to something more comfortable? > These days descriptive variable/function names are much more valuable, > I think. > > Just by looking at random examples in the tree, seems the 80 column > rule does more harm than good. I always find myself start shortening > names just to fit the line limit and not to need to line-wrap a statement.
I've found myself drifting to and from favouring the 80 cols limit in my own code. It's a good way of forcing yourself to refactor, which usually works out nicely, and I've even managed to write Java that was mostly 80 cols (which is a far bigger challenge than C due to the required preceding tab depth for a method inside a class..)
> We even use #defines sometimes to access simple structure members and > the like, only to fit that rule.
This is usually for multiple levels of dereferencing, and it really does help readability.
> So, are we sure that 80 columns is still valuable, looking at the > side-effects of artificially shortended variable/function names and > line-wrapped statements, caused by this rule?
It's fairly redundant trying to answer this question without the opinion of the people that really matter. I'd hazard a guess and say that if you ranked kernel contributors by man-hours spent on the kernel, the top ten would all think the 80 columns rule was critically important.
-- Cheers, Alistair.
'No sense being pessimistic, it probably wouldn't work anyway.' Third year Computer Science undergraduate. 1F2 55 South Clerk Street, Edinburgh, UK. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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