Re:The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card
by int_19h on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @03:55PM
(#11857290)
It goes both ways. If you break in the middle of the line just because you need to follow the standard, you may end up breaking in the middle of a construct that is really meant to be read as a whole; and having to move your focus to from the end of one line to the beginning of another is quite disruptive to the flow.
I'm also not convinced that 80 chars "happens to line up quite well with the human eyes ability to track horizontal lines of text". It's claimed often, but in the absence of any actual studies, the best you can really say on this is that it is your subjective experience. Mine is different - I find 100-120 columns per line to be eminently more readable.
Until the aforementioned study determines what the average peak readability length of _code_ (which I think is likely to be different from regular text, because the semantic units are different between the two), we'll just have to agree to disagree.
I'm also not convinced that 80 chars "happens to line up quite well with the human eyes ability to track horizontal lines of text". It's claimed often, but in the absence of any actual studies, the best you can really say on this is that it is your subjective experience. Mine is different - I find 100-120 columns per line to be eminently more readable.
Until the aforementioned study determines what the average peak readability length of _code_ (which I think is likely to be different from regular text, because the semantic units are different between the two), we'll just have to agree to disagree.