My first programming experience was in APL/1500 via a 2741. APL could have arbitrarily long lines that would just wrap.

Next i went to cards and the FORTRAN limit of 66 for the code (5 for label, one for comment, 66 for code, 8 for seq). As i moved to dumb terminals, decwriters, IBM 2780/3780/3270/3279, Tek4010/4014, and others the 80 char limit still made sense. But these days i have migrated up, a max of 120 seems common, sometimes 130 or 140. My default window size is 120, and sometimes get a left/right slider. But i try to keep most of the code under 80. I find its lines with lots of static text that grow past that.

But i see nothing wrong in keeping it below 80, as it does make it easier to read and enforces a cleaner design to the code. Long lines of code, can be hard to follow

In reply to Re: To <=80 char code line length or not by huck
in thread To <=80 char code line length or not by stevieb

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