Comment length

[Noxwizard]

Another one of the unwritten coding guidelines is that comments in code and other places should be limited to some fixed width. Depending on who asks you, the request will either be for 79 characters or 80 characters as that's the standard console width. The other reasoning is because we use Github which limits their page width to 800px, which makes someone have to scroll to read long sections of text.

Since this has been requested multiple times in various pull requests, the width requirement should reach some consensus and be added to the coding guidelines. It should also state when and where this should be used (i.e. only in README type files, if indented .php comments need to be 79 - 4x#tabs chars wide, etc...). Naderman has also suggested adapting the PSR-2 guidelines about this: https://github.com/php-fig/fig-standard ... d#23-lines

[Oleg]

My vote is for at most 79 chars in any comment or readme lien.

Yes, with 8 space tabs this does not leave many characters for the text itself at high nesting levels. Don't nest high.

[imkingdavid]

I agree with Oleg for 79. Most modern code editors and IDE's will display the current character position within the line, so that makes it a bit easier to keep track.

[naderman]

What's the reasoning for 79 vs. 80? +/- signs in diffs?

[Oleg]

80th char is for the scrollbar.

When placing a vertical line at 80 chars in a gui editor, lines that are 80 chars long have the last char overlapping the line.

There are probably others.

[naderman]

Huh what kind of editor does that? Typically the scrollbar starts after the 80 characters? :S

[nickvergessen]

What about whitespaces that are in front of the // ?

[naderman]

They count. The purpose of this is to limit the width to the same everywhere. So anything that increases width, e.g. whitespace counts.