Hi guys,
Late responding, after dealing with power being down out here until about
1:00 am last night. We don't have earthquakes, just other sources of
excitement. I tend to stick to 80 character lines because not all terminal
interfaces can handle anything bigger very smoothly. Now, if we are all
using xterm-based stuff on linux boxes that resizes nicely, then there are
some instances where longer lines can make the code more readable, in my
view, but I would still prefer that lengths not get much longer than 100
chars. I say this because I typically bring up at least 4 windows to do
code work, and may need that many windows or more to get the total context
needed. So when you go to really long lines, you can limit yourself to just
a couple of contexts effectively - two wide windows. And Tom is right that
some of us do have limits as to how small we can set our default font, so
that limits our ability to just make the window smaller :-) One way I deal
with writing code within an 80 line limitation is to use 2 char indents (I
think you all have code-standardized on 3 but pmemd was all at 2 beforehand,
so I am not exactly rushing right out to reformat it all, especially since I
like the benefit of not having to deal with line wrapping more often). The
other thing to remember here is that if your driving force behind really
long lines is dealing with deep indentation levels, then putting appropriate
chunks of code in subroutines can help. Chances are that if you are 15
indent levels deep, you could write the code better. This is all what would
be called "religion", just like language wars - no correct answers, but that
is how I would justify the choices I have made.
Happy Holidays to all - Bob
----- Original Message -----
From: "darden" <darden.gamera.niehs.nih.gov>
To: <amber-developers.scripps.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2006 5:51 PM
Subject: Re: amber-developers: amber10 code broken in qm2_dftb_gb.f
> maybe no one else is replying---i usually get annoyed with overflow
> lines---editor behaves strangely unless terminal set up right---so i like
> an 80 character line limit--although I'm probably guilty as well of
> violating it
>
> also let me just register my general annoyance with these generation Y
> small font guys---just a form of age discrimination if you ask me--grrr
> td
>
> On Wed, 22 Nov 2006, David A. Case wrote:
>
>> In the process of fixing up Amber 10's qm2_dftb_gb code (see CVS logs), I
>> again faced the line-length problem for sander code.
>>
>> It has been apparent for some time that lots of people are unwilling to
>> live
>> with 80 character lines, and maybe that is a good idea in a modern age.
>> But
>> I also don't think we should allow arbitrarily long lines either, just
>> because
>> some particular person (initials are RCW) likes to use a small font and a
>> giant terminal. The code becomes very difficult to read for everyone
>> else.
>>
>> So I'm looking for input: what do people think we should enforce as a
>> line
>> length limit? And, do we have any formatters for Fortran that do this?
>> (We can use indent for C-code, but I don't know where things stand for
>> F90
>> code).
>>
>> ...thanks for your input....dac
>>
>
Received on Sun Nov 26 2006 - 06:07:08 PST
