On Fri, Aug 29, 2003 at 12:52:08PM -0400, Stephen Leake wrote:
> Peter Hermann <[log in to unmask]> writes:
>
> > My default settings of options would be
> > line_length => 79
> >                  software and hardwaretools of all ages without problems
>
> Ada is a "tool for the next century"; let's not carry the "support
> legacy stuff" too far. There's no excuse for a line length limit of
> less than 120.

I disagree with that rather dogmatic statement. It is true that text
files with 120 characters/line are  no problem as such, but I have
found "sdiff" to be a very useful and important tool for me. With lines
up to 80 characters long, it is just about possible  to get a readable
"sdiff" listing in a window of width around 165 characters. I suspect
a window of width 240 would be unreadable, at least to me with eyes
over half a century old. With a judicious choice of "use" clauses, I
can easily keep my code within 80 characters per line.

It helps that I indent calls in the style

  Procedure_Name (
     Par1 => Val1,
     Par2 => Val2);

and not as

  Procedure_Name (Par1 => Val1,
                  Par2 => Val2);

which in my eyes make the code look very irregular, since the length
of procedure names varies.

Just an opinion of course.

Niklas Holsti

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