Re: Perl 80 Chars perl line Rule

I wouldn’t hold fast to any sort of “rule,” which definitely to me smacks of the days in which we all used CRTs. Especially not at the risk of unnecessarily disturbing [large blocks of ...] source-lines that presently work, and of also seriously damaging the revision-tracking capability of the source code control system (SCCS). If, on a case-by-case basis, it appears that a block of code is inconsistent with its neighbors and therefore genuinely hard-to-read, then I would highlight that block of code and tidy it ... checking in the results (having made no other changes) immediately back into the SCCS, with an appropriate notation, “tidied this.” (I strongly advocate keeping all such commits separate: don’t change code and tidy it in the same commit.)

P.S.: I’m also not suggesting here that longer source-lines are somehow better. In fact, “you young turks” should bear in mind that one day your optometrist is going to screw-up your glasses prescription, even to the point of getting the damm things so badly cut that the top half has a different focal-length than the bottom half ... bah!

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Re^2: Perl 80 Chars perl line Rule by BillKSmith (Monsignor) on Dec 04, 2012 at 21:49 UTC
The rule is much older than you seem to think. Some of us still remember 80 column IBM punch cards. (Many versions of FORTRAN reserved the last eight of these for "sequence numbers") Bill	[reply]
Re^3: Perl 80 Chars perl line Rule by ww (Archbishop) on Dec 04, 2012 at 22:11 UTC
80 col IBM... ...and long after that, my first, personally-owned puter: O1 with a (or is memory failing along with my eyes) a 5-inch, 52 column screen. Ah, just rolling in the remembered joy of the DD and 80-col upgrades!	[reply]
Re^4: Perl 80 Chars perl line Rule by LanX (Saint) on Dec 04, 2012 at 22:36 UTC
I think 40 chars in 25 lines where standard, when I did my first steps on the first common desktop computer generations 30 years ago. IIRC some computers like Apple II and/or CBM 4000 could be run with half width characters to achieve 80 chars/line. Cheers Rolf PS: God bless my mum for allowing her nerd kid to book evening classes at an "adult education center" to play with "Komputer"s to learn science fiction technologies like BASIC and ASSEMBLER... =)	[reply]