Does my indentation level look big in this?

[ewx]

[Poll #1398064]

Comments

[oldbloke.livejournal.com]

Where's 72? Good old FORTRAN...

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

No hard limit, but I tend to try and break up lines longer than about 120-140 chars. I'd better stress I'm not writing code that other people have to maintain.

[daniel silverstone (from livejournal.com)]

Enforcing any given arbitrary limit is daft.

Instead it should be "Common sense" wrt. line length IMO.

[bugshaw.livejournal.com]

That call breaks my friends page ;-)

[sparrowsion]

Anything over 80 columns better have a reasonable excuse (eg it's using a C++ interface to a Java framework, like what I'm doing right now). Anything over 132 columns will result in Paddington Bear Hard Stares.

[lnr]

I admit my tabs are usually 3 or 4 spaces, so I do go over 80 columns sometimes, but I try to avoid going much over 100 or 132 because it starts to get unreadable. I find a 1 or 2 space indent just a bit too small to follow.

[baljemmett.livejournal.com]

Anything between about 80 and about 132 here; a hard limit isn't a useful requirement for most of the environments we work in. As ever, readability is more important than slavishly fitting lines inside some arbitrary limit; spilling a few characters over isn't going to summon nasal demons.

[Although I may need to consult the manual for EDIT /TPU on VMS to find out if there's some way to actually work on lines that have been marked as extending past the edge of the screen... Ugh. Sticking to an 80 character limit makes sense there!]

[simont]

In code I originate myself, 80 columns (though I allow myself the occasional insanely long line if breaking it up would somehow manage to be even uglier). I like to fill a high-resolution display with lots of 80-column-wide terminals and editors rather than maximising one window over the whole thing, and even if I didn't do that I'd like to think I'd have some sympathy for other people reading my code who did.

At work, I maintain (among other things) a program which was written by somebody with a wider editor window than that, and so far it has seemed easier to expand my own editor window than to do a big reformatting checkin. (Particularly given that his code wouldn't be very easy to reformat to 80 columns, since he did tend to draw all his identifiers from a naming scheme of which your last option is only a mild exaggeration.)

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

I'd be interested to know whether those who go for eighty columns correlate with those with a *nix background...

[tienelle.livejournal.com]

[X] Your DoorReleaseRemoteControl... broke my friends page, you insensitive clod.

[imc.livejournal.com]

On a similar line to those above…

[X] It is vital that polls including calls to DoorReleaseRemoteControlEscutcheonPlateBezelFactoryFactory.CreateDoorReleaseRemoteControlEscutcheonPlateBezelFactory be placed under an lj-cut.

[bjh21.livejournal.com]

You failed to provide an option for 79 characters, which is the correct width for ensuring that emacs -nw doesn't wrap your lines.

[mooism.livejournal.com]

I like to be able to print code without the lines wrapping, and I default to 132cpl.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

This needs a follow-up poll on the right way to indent code:

[ ] 8 unit wide hard tabs only
[ ] 4 unit wide hard tabs only
[ ] space-based soft tabs at 8 units only
[ ] space-based soft tabs at 4 units only
[ ] an ungodly mixture of 8 unit wide hard tabs and spaces
[ ] whatever M-x c-indent-command thinks is right
[ ] I only write lisp

[pm215]

Wrapping at 80 generally feels artificially narrow to me -- usually my first act with an 80-column anything is to make it wider. Usually I just wrap at however wide my emacs happens to be, which is usually somewhere between 100 and 132 columns. I think 80-wrapping code like this:

        hits = (find_next_bp_hit('INSTR_EXEC', None, self.swbps | self.hwbps, begints, endts, term),
                find_next_bp_hit('MEM_WRITE', 'watch', self.writewps | self.accesswps, begints, endts, term),
                find_next_bp_hit('MEM_READ', 'watch', self.readwps | self.accesswps, begints, endts, term),
                scan_terminator(begints, endts, term))

would hurt its readability somewhat, which is why I'm not much in favour of such a low width.

[cjwatson]

I almost always try for 80 to avoid causing other people problems reading the code (and since I find overly deep indentation to be a sign of other problems, see above), although in reality I sometimes forget since for various reasons I have got into the habit of using maximised terminal windows.