IBM, sonic delay lines, and the history of the 80×24 display

Re:IBM, sonic delay lines, and the history of the 80×24 display by throw0101b on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @07:36AM (#39369121)

Typographically, 80 characters across is (approaching) the limit of how far one can go from the far-right of the page'back to the start on the left, and still be able to keep track of which line you're on.

(La)TeX defaults to around 70 characters, and there are often questions about why the margins are so big (on a typical 8.5x11/A4 page).

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Re:IBM, sonic delay lines, and the history of the 80×24 display by adrian_b on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @07:46AM (#39369210)

That is true for continuous English text.

Programs have lines with a very variable length, which changes a lot the ability to locate lines.

I prefer very much 132-character lines to 80-character lines.

Those who claim that 80-character lines are good enough write only programs which may have a complex structure, but nonetheless they do only simple data manipulation, like copying and searching.

There are also programs which do complex computations, so there are many long expressions for which splitting them in multiple lines makes the programs much less readable.

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Re:IBM, sonic delay lines, and the history of the 80×24 display by jgalt212 on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @09:00AM (#39369814)

> I prefer very much 132-character lines to 80-character lines.

Yes for code. No for prose.

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