On 10/29/2012 10:28 AM, Alexander Solla wrote:
In any language, a line longer than 80 characters usually (but not always) suggests that you might want to stop and rethink your design. In many cases a refactoring or two will greatly simplify the code and reduce your line length as a result.
I disagree. That might be true for imperative languages, where width is indicative of deep nesting and its associated problems. But it is not true for a functional language, where it is merely indicative of a wide "normal form". Yes, the normal form can sometimes be refactored, but to what end? You might easily end up refactoring out of the level of abstraction you actually want. Or the wide form might have useful properties, like the ability to sort the lines of source code alphanumerically (which would be lost if you switched to a stanza-based format)
Well, I did leave the door open for special cases with "usually (but not always)." I know I've had to go over 80 chars before with huge constants or long test names. If you're willing to sacrifice maintain/readability for some other property (e.g. source code sortability), then I don't think my point applies.