Re: Which code style do you prefer the most?

Michael S <already5chosen@yahoo.com> writes:

On Fri, 28 Feb 2025 00:29:29 +0000
Richard Harnden <richard.nospam@gmail.invalid> wrote:

[...]

Computer terminals, back in the day, were basically square,

>
My impression is that even in early days 5:4 was more common than
square.

Measuring an old VGA monitor, which is pretty close to an old
computer terminal, shows an aspect ratio of 3:2 (width:height).
Certainly not square.

so 80 columns was often a hard limit.

The reasoning here is backwards.  The choice of 80 columns wasn't
made to accommodate a given aspect ratio;  rather, the choice of
screen width was made to accommodate 80 columns.  Furthermore the
choice of 80 columns was not plucked out of thin air, or made to
fit some accidental hardware constraint;  rather, the choice of 80
columns was made to provide a suitable width for a single line, and
hardware was designed around that.

Probably the choice of having only 24 lines was made for some kind
of balance and for cost reasons.  But the choice of 80 columns was
made long before choices were made for computer terminals.

Now you have larger landscape screens, with windows that can be
stretched as wide as you like.

A common aspect ratio these days is 16:9 (ie, HD).  But that
choice was made to be able to show movies, not to allow absurdly
long lines of text, which is an incidental consequence.

For many years I use 1200x1920 (yes, portait) as my main monitor
at work.
Turning Full HD 90 degrees does not work as well - 1080 is too
narrow.  In this case 11% difference matters.

My sense is that an aspect ratio of 7:5 or 3:2 (in both cases
height:width) is about right for one page.  We might want a small
strip of screen real estate for a header, so going from 1.5 to
1.6 seems workable (note incidentally that 1920:1200 is a ratio
of 1.6).  But HD is 1.78 to 1;  that shape is just awkward for
the display of text.