On 22 Apr 2009, at 8:09 pm, Jason Dusek wrote:
Really, the whole thing makes me wish we had blasphemy laws.
If any person, in speaking or in writing, shall indicate a preference for column widths other than 80 or indent characters other than spaces (`0x20`) they shall be compelled to present some science or be subject to imprisonment.
I did find a paper that claimed that 95-character lines were significantly faster to read than three shorter lengths. On closer study, it turned out that they were using the "paging" model rather than the "scrolling" model: once you came to the end of a (short) page of text, you had to hit the Next button to see the next page. What they had in fact proved was that hitting the Next Page button takes time... Now that I have access to a recent Mac laptop, I've found that in reading plain text, I like to make the lines narrower and to approximate continuous scrolling: read one paragraph, stroke the pad to move the next one up, keep on doing it. There are several important differences between program text and ordinary running natural language text. In particular, program text is two-dimensional in a way that ordinary text is not. By the way, in the era of punched cards, while the *cards* were 80 columns, one's *text area* was not. Typically the last 8 columns were used for a sequence number, so that if you dropped your cards -- yes, this happened -- you could sort them back into order, and to provide editing facilities. So people were really programming with 72-column lines. That seemed to work pretty well, and printers seemed to have no trouble reproducing it in books. I do know a psychologist who has done reading studies; I must see if I can talk him into looking into this.