[raverbashing]

Just confirming that 80 characters is an idiotic and arbitrary "standard", propagated by nothing much more than cargo-culting

"Oh but it fits my screen, fits two-by-two on my screen" change font size, unless you're using the native 80x25 PC display (some kernel developers use that)

I can't imagine a worse use of developer time than making everything fit exactly inside 80 columns

Of course, not having a limit is bad as well, but the main issue is having a hard limit

[silverlake]

I think the rationalizations devs use to defend their arbitrary choices are fascinating. Readability? My dead-tree Wall Street Journal uses 30 character width columns. NYTimes online is about 70 chars. New Yorker about 80. Textbooks, paperbacks, magazines, newsletters... all have different char widths. Yet I've never suffered an aneurism reading any of these things. The fact that it doesn't matter much would be sacrilege to most devs.

[unethical_ban]

>propagated by nothing much more than cargo-culting

It's propagated because it's a standard, and it seems many people ARE comfortable with it. It also seems that I enjoy my font-size just the way it is.

I've just written my first reusable, outlive-my-employment level of code, and keeping my code under 80 lines was trivially easy. The only thing that was the slightest level of nuisance was that the function parser in notepad++ couldn't cope with a multi-line string definition inside a function.

The bulk of my time was writing clear, understandable and educational documentation for the library.

Why are you so hostile?