22 Apr
2009
22 Apr
'09
7:57 p.m.
Some material I've read on typography -- can't find the reference now -- suggests ~65 is the best number of characters per line. The advice was, if your page is larger than that, you should make columns. If someone has done some studies with specifically program text, I'd of course be really interested to know what they discovered; but I really do suspect the issue of line length is more about having a convention than having the best one. Would people who prefer, for example, 132 character lines switch to 66 if that were empirically the best? Probably not. The 80 column convention sets a clear expectation for all of us; it's not a matter of what anyone likes. -- Jason Dusek