Simon Peyton Jones
In my view 80 chars is too short. It was justified in the days of 80-column CRTs, but that just isn't a restriction any more. I routinely edit in a much wider window.
As far as a hard length limit is concerned I am with Simon here. 80 characters is quite short and some of the more "tabular" source files of GHC would be on the whole less readable if such a limit were strictly enforced. On the other hand, I agree that in many cases 80-characters is quite a convenient length; having several buffers side-by-side can make reading much easier. Many of the files with long-lines could and should be fixed. However, I am not convinced that this is true for *all* source files and in my opinion a bit of discretion doesn't hurt. Cheers, - Ben