Re: Update of Coding standards line length

On Nov 25, 2008, at 1:09 AM, Kristopher Ives wrote:

In all honesty the 80 char limit would seem to fit better in PEAR2 and should be removed from PEAR1.

I concur with Bill Shupp on this one. The always intelligent Paul M. Jones has a great post about line length that everyone really should read: http://paul-m-jones.com/?p=276 The 80 character line limit, in my opinion, has zero to do with how big my display is or how wide my terminal window is. The reason it exists is the same reason us English speakers frown on run-on sentences; our brains have trouble parsing such long structures. Consider the following two examples: My name is Joe. I work at Digg. I'm a professional PHP coder. In my spare time I enjoy snowboarding. vs. My name is Joe and I work at Digg where I'm a professional PHP coder, but in my spare time I enjoy snowboarding. The same thing applies to code. Exceptionally long lines (I'm looking at YOU giant SQL statements) are simply hard for brains to digest. We've got a change to the RFC[1] that, along with PEAR2 and PHP 5.3's namespaces, should mitigate a *very* large portion of the complaints stemming from the 80 character line limit. I see no reason to change this now. Also, to everyone complaining about verbose output from phpcs it should be noted that PEAR does *not* require your code pass 100% through phpcs before it's accepted so I'm unsure why this is being touted as such a burdon. --Joe [1] http://pear.php.net/pepr/pepr-proposal-show.php?id=538