Re: Fwd: sed porting trouble

[Jim Meyering]

Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 10/04/10 06:49, Eric Blake wrote:
>> Lines less than 80 columns are nicer in my opinion, and we might as well
>> do that whether or not -Wcolumns is in effect when the end result looks
>> nicer.
>
> The message I'm getting back from all this is that
> I shouldn't have wasted everybody's time on this topic.

On the contrary.  I like the line-shortening changes,
and especially the new syntax-check.  We can exempt
the long URL and any other exceptions people require.

Letting lines longer than 80 columns slip into code that
we have to review is a problem for several reasons, not
least of which is that it makes it far too easy to
miss differences in the tail end of wrapped lines.
Sure, that's a low-probability event, but bugs in general
are low-probability (at least that's the hope), and we should
do what we can to minimize that probability.

Re 80-columns.  All of my terminals are 80 or 81 columns wide,
and while it's "easy" to enlarge a terminal, I do it so rarely
that it might as well be "never".  Then there's the issue of
side-by-side diffs and 3-way merges.  3 * 80 is 240 columns.
If you have a 1900+-wide pixel monitor or good eyes and a small font,
that's no problem, but on a smaller screens or with larger fonts,
you will be hard-pressed to fit three non-overlapping 90- or 100-column
windows.