[racket] syntax, differently

From: Neil Van Dyke (neil at neilvandyke.org)
Date: Sat Jul 31 11:44:25 EDT 2010

Robby Findler wrote at 07/31/2010 11:19 AM:
> On Sat, Jul 31, 2010 at 10:00 AM, Matthias Felleisen
> <matthias at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>   
>> 1. Could drracket limit the width of programs in the teaching language world to 80 columns?
>>     
>
> This one seems doable (I'd probably make the text turn red when it passes the 80th column or somethign instead of rejecting keystrokes).
>   

If it's a visual indicator, I would very much like to have that 
available as an option in the non-teaching languages as well.  After 
working on a file in DrRacket for a while, I usually have to clean up 
the new overly-long lines in Emacs.

Typical indicators are a gray line in the background after column 79 or 
80, or a background color change there, like from white to light gray.

I'm not sure about red.  Sometimes, rightward drift and a long 
identifier or literal means you have no practical choice but to violate 
the 79/80 border.  IMHO, border incursion is not quite as grave an 
offense as some of the other things for which we might want to use red.

Regarding 79 or 80, 80 is now good for lots of people who previously had 
to use 79, though probably some people would like the option of 79.  
(For a long time, it was 79 for lots of Unix people, first because some 
terminals would to an automatic newline of some kind on a write in 
column 80, and then because some tools liked to put adornments in column 
80.  Some tools still like to.)  100 also seems a popular max width in 
some people's 'coding standards'.  MS Visual Studio, for example, lets 
you set this border to an arbitrary number, IIRC.

-- 
http://www.neilvandyke.org/
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