Re: [RFA] New testcase to evaluate Fortran substring expression

[Mark Kettenis <mark.kettenis@xs4all.nl>]

   Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2005 16:21:37 +0800 (CST)
   From: Wu Zhou <woodzltc@cn.ibm.com>

   Sorry, I am not very sure what is the maximum limit of a line in the sources
   and comments.  Maybe it is 72? or 80, or any other number?  Maybe I can 
   choose to use the smaller one?  

We're not too strict about it.  The default value for "fill-column" in
emacs is 70, so I'd say it's more 72 than 80, especially for comments.
But for code it's ok to have slightly longer lines, if it improves the
readability of your code, as long as things stay under 80.  Please
don't put anything in column 80 (or 79 if you live in a non-Fortran
world ;-), because some terminals wrap as soon as you put something in
the last column.

By the way, there is a good reason for following this practice, even
if many people are using environments that can display more than 80
characters on a line.  There has been quite a bit of research on
optimal line length by psychologists.  Making lines to long makes
things difficult to read; people start skipping lines.  Look at some
well typeset books and count the number of characters on it.  You'll
end up with somthing 70-ish for most of them

Mark