Re: rough first impressions

[Raffael Cavallaro <raffaelcavallaro@xxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday, April 15, 2003, at 05:03 AM, Jonas \sster wrote:

> Screen real estate is not the only, or for that part the most
> important, reason to limit line length. Rather, you have to think about
> ergonomy here. Long lines are harder for the eyes and the brain to
> follow.

This has to be balanced against the readability of the tokens 
themselves. An 80 column line of short, cryptic identifiers is far less 
readable than a 100 column line of plain english (assuming one is a 
speaker of english).

Of course in normal text this is not an issue, because it is just as 
readable if lines wrap, as if they do not. This tends not to be true of 
programming languages because of the block structuring.

The natural conclusion of all this, is that a programming language 
should be designed to be equally easy to read if lines wrap. This of 
course leaves Python out of the running... ;^)

Raffael Cavallaro, Ph.D.
raffaelcavallaro@mac.com