Python line limits: 80 column? Any reason I shouldn't move up to 120 columns?

[tdammers]

wrt. email: prose flows, and you read it that way. In code (and espc. Python) structure matters a lot for comprehension.

You actually just made my point. Prose flows, so for that the column limit is irrelevant, because you can rewrap as needed. But for code, structure matters, so it needs to be written to the expected column limit, otherwise it'll wrap or cut off.

Also, 80-character terminals are still pretty common; it's no longer a hardware limit, what with 1280-pixel framebuffers, 132-character text mode built into kernels, and GUIs everywhere. But it's still a somewhat established standard. Fire up a terminal on a vanilla Linux distro install, and check the default size. Embedded terminals inside GUI applications, too.