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Robby Findler wrote at 07/31/2010 11:19 AM:
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<pre wrap="">On Sat, Jul 31, 2010 at 10:00 AM, Matthias Felleisen
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:matthias@ccs.neu.edu"><matthias@ccs.neu.edu></a> wrote:
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<pre wrap="">1. Could drracket limit the width of programs in the teaching language world to 80 columns?
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This one seems doable (I'd probably make the text turn red when it passes the 80th column or somethign instead of rejecting keystrokes).
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<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.neilvandyke.org/">http://www.neilvandyke.org/</a>
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