Re: [Haskell-beginners] Re: Compiling C into Haskell

On 16 Apr 2010, at 08:20, Ertugrul Soeylemez wrote:

Juan Pedro Bolivar Puente wrote:

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I am going a bit off-topic here...

Me too, but that's how mailing lists work. =)

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And what is the universally best length of line anyway? I have also seen people sending emails with really thin columns that get annoying to read... If you feel bad about emails sent with long lines, just enable text wrapping in your email reader.

The big problem is that some mail/news readers assume that lines are prebroken, especially when it comes to older terminal-based readers.

I'd highly recommend that you stop using such readers, or patch them to soft-wrap long lines, neither is difficult.

This is bad, but it's the state of things. Otherwise there is little reason to prebreak lines and many reasons not to do it. I think mail/news readers like Thunderbird go into the right direction by employing an additional header, which precisely specifies the line breaking behaviour used in the mail. The actual text is prewrapped, but using the header newer readers can reconstruct the paragraphs and display them the way the user wishes.

Interesting, and useful sounding, though how does it tell the difference between a wrap at 80 characters and an intentional new line at 80 characters?

In fact I would love if HTML mails would be more accepted in the open source community. After all there is nothing bad about HTML and it would solve the above problem. Most reasonings against it are related to compatibility or interoperability, which is no problem, because you can always add a text/plain part.

I suspect the only way this would solve the problem is by forcing people not to use broken email clients – you can't read an html email in an old email client, in the same way as you can't read a non-hard-wrapped email in an ancient email client. Anyway, my basic point is that an email client that will not soft-wrap lines is fundamentally broken. Emails can and do have lines longer than 80 characters, and a client that can't render them has a serious bug. If your client is one of these, I suggest you either (a) move to a less buggy client, or (b) write a patch to fix the bug. The correct solution though is not to enforce upon everyone else that they must write emails with a particular line length. Bob