Reply to post:

80-characters-per-line limits should be terminal, says Linux kernel chief Linus Torvalds

Roland6 Silver badge

The limit is convention and portability across devices and output formats, remember most people like to use fixed spaced fonts like Courier, 80 characters at 10 or 11 point fits nicely across an A4 portrait page.

Looking at what Linus is saying it seems that he is saying, it is okay for some lines to be slightly over 80 characters, but he isn't encouraging the usage of lines of over 100 characters.

Basically the problem we have is the verbose nature of many system calls making it hard at times to put much on a single line.

Other than older card-based languages such as Cobol, languages such as Algol-60 and its derivatives and successors don't actually care about line length - the preprocessor strips out the characters inserted to make the programme human readable.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon