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Is the 80 character line limit still relevant? (2008)


Welcome to Richard Dingwall's Blog where yo can have fun and also learn great stuff about popular software development methodologies.

Traditionally, it’s always been standard practice for programmers to wrap long lines of code so they don’t span more than 80 characters across the screen. The three-year-old Powerbook I am writing this post on, for example, can easily display over 200 characters across the screen, at a comfortable 10 point font size. We’ve all got 24″ wide-screen LCD displays, and 120 characters seems to be a good fit for our .NET/Visual Studio development environment, while still leaving ample whitespace.

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