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A comment on Cosmopolitan v3.5.0. Parent comment

Re:Cosmopolitan v3.5.0 by tiffanyh on Monday June 24, 2024 @11:14AM (#40777013)
It's a bit easier to do when you don't limit yourself to exactly 80-char per line

  Those commits were 
  72-chars per line.
  Which is easier to
  do than EXACTLY 80
  character per line
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Re:Cosmopolitan v3.5.0 by aidenn0 on Monday June 24, 2024 @12:37PM (#40778128)
72 characters per line is a common standard for git commit messages. If you use vim, the syntax highlighting will nudge you to exactly that number.

https://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit-mess...

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Re:Cosmopolitan v3.5.0 by layer8 on Monday June 24, 2024 @12:41PM (#40778174)
72 characters is the standard limit for Git though. This convention has a long tradition from the text-mode days of email and Usenet in 80-column terminals/screens, where 72 characters allowed for the addition of a reasonable number of quoting levels (indicated by prefixing quoted lines with “>”), and/or for other line markers, before exceeding the screen width and having to reformat.
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Re:Cosmopolitan v3.5.0 by hyperman1 on Thursday June 27, 2024 @07:20PM (#40816238)
COBOL code seems to live in 72 columns, with the last 8 columns of a punch card were 'free for programmer use'.

Now I am wondering if somehow, some ancient COBOL limit ended up in git because every tool picked it up as convention from an older tool.

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