80 or 79 characters limit?

Christian Mauderer oss at c-mauderer.de
Thu Nov 5 19:12:35 UTC 2020


Hello Joel and Sebastian,

On 05/11/2020 16:44, Joel Sherrill wrote:
> 
> 
> On Thu, Nov 5, 2020, 9:26 AM Sebastian Huber
> <sebastian.huber at embedded-brains.de
> <mailto:sebastian.huber at embedded-brains.de>> wrote:
> 
>     Hello,
> 
>     I review currently the Coding Conventions. Should the 80 characters
>     limit be really a 79 characters limit with the \n as the invisible 80th
>     character?
> 
> 
> Yes. 
> 
> As old as this makes me feel, I remember printers which did an automatic
> linefeed and then the newline one if you hit column 80. So it really is
> 79 unfortunately.

I don't think printers with an automatic linefeed are a common use case
for reading the RTEMS source code nowadays. So that maybe isn't the best
reason for using 79 characters.

I would suggest to use the same convention that most coding styles use
which seems to be 80 characters:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characters_per_line#In_programming

At least if there are no more recent examples for tools or editors where
79 is a benefit. 80 seems just feels a bit more natural.

By the way: If we count '\n': Should we count a tab '\t' as a single
character, as 2, as 4 or as 8 ones? What about the few Unicode
characters that slipped in over the years?

Best regards

Christian

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