How wide is your code?
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I can't stand code that avoids CR's. Code should above all be easy to read and follow by others. Nicely spaced, indented and printable, with not too much on each line.
Me too. :)
Anna :rose: Having a bad bug day? Tech Blog | Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "If mushy peas are the food of the devil, the stotty cake is the frisbee of God"
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You young'uns ar spoiled by modern technology. I'm one of those old geezers still writing code, dangerously close to the 3 decade mark. I think John Simmons is older than me. He's angrier, i'm more dangerous ;) So, I'm contemplating a couple of s/w issues and one of those is - when to hit the return key? As I type this, I have to my left a 1920x1200 monitor connected to my 1920x1200 laptop. It seems to me a little silly to worry about any developer who might not have the same h/w rsources. To arbitrarily linebreak at 80, 132, or whatever seems a bit silly. Printing? Muahahahaaha.. come on. Thoughts?
Charlie Gilley Will program for food... Hurtling toward a government of the stupid, by the stupid, for the stupid we go. —Michelle Malkin This crap sandwich is all yours.... 2009 "Stimulus Bill"
Whatever the other developer hasn't got, surely they have line wrap, the ingrates.
You really gotta try harder to keep up with everyone that's not on the short bus with you. - John Simmons / outlaw programmer.
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haha - rebel. Seriously, why 91?
Charlie Gilley Will program for food... Hurtling toward a government of the stupid, by the stupid, for the stupid we go. —Michelle Malkin This crap sandwich is all yours.... 2009 "Stimulus Bill"
It's a comfortable width. Up until a couple of years ago, I was doing 80 characters.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001 -
also *salutes* As a young'un, I have always wanted to try punch cards! There's something compelling about an analogue system I can feel with my hands, having now gone through uni without even leaning machine code or anything similarly fundamental, and binary was always just theory and maths - never actually used in practice etc. I know it's simply a nostalgia/novelty thing (and worth being on the receiving end of a bit of a chuckle from 'those who know') but I have read so many books on computing over the years and it would be great to have a taste of the frustration and history! Is there anywhere in Australia, (or the world?) where you can use a punch-card system? Any working computer museums out there to let us know how good we've got it now? Cheers, Estherino
Monash University in Melbourne is one place to look - I think they have some oldish CDC kit and a Ferranti Sirius, Atlas' little brother. Sydney Uni Basser School of CompSci may have some old kit too left over from Csirac, which was a near clone of the original Univac, the former was built by CSIRO in the 50/60's - Basser inherited it (I think). IBM may have some working punched card gear somewhere. You might be even find a hand operated punch at least that would probably still work, try Ebay. Or you could ask the Governor of Florida, he/she may have one left over from the chad debacle of 2000 :-D . I think Atlas has been resurrected in part at least, presumably at Manchester or maybe its at the Science Museum in South Kensington along with Babbages Engine, and I think they may have put Colossus back together at Bletchley Park if you're over that way, and there's an Elliot machine at Bletchley too. The only analog system I ever got to play with for a few weeks was a one of Elliot's flight simulation systems that they bolted onto our 803 digital system in an attempt to solve a simulation problem, it didn't work - well at least not in the time frame our manager was demanding - you know I want it by lunchtime, today. Don't think it had punch cards though, potentiometers, capacitor sliders and a patch panel are what I remember. Mercury delay memory was good stuff, you could watch your program's scribbles. If we had it today then MS wouldn't need to ban memcpy from their code. Did anyone here work on Singer Link flight simulators. I had a flight in a Link F111 simulator up at Amberley in the late '70's, scary stuff because its physical, i.e. it shakes, rattles and rolls in real space & time; wonder if they're still working, if the F111's are still flying then they may be, worth a look if they'll let you in, they had two back then. Much more interesting that a punched card. And what about the Singer System 10, now that was a weird system, it had hardware decimal arithmetic as I recall, everything was in 10's, all data was written in blocks of a 100 six bit bytes, and you could have assembler or RPG. I always thought it bizarre that a sewing machine company should make things like flight simulators & decimal computers. Have fun
Multi famam, conscientiam pauci verentur.(Pliny)
modified on Monday, May 18, 2009 5:48 AM
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Printing is no issue to me; I've got a 24" HP plotter, so any page up to 150' wide is no trouble. ;P My screen is somewhat more limited, however.
"A Journey of a Thousand Rest Stops Begins with a Single Movement"
Roger Wright wrote:
Printing is no issue to me; I've got a 24" HP plotter, so any page up to 150' wide is no trouble ;P
Does that mean you've still got a working copy of Sideways, mine morphed into a movie :sigh:
Multi famam, conscientiam pauci verentur.(Pliny)
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charlieg wrote:
I'm one of those old geezers still writing code, dangerously close to the 3 decade mark.
Youngster! I wrote my first program in 1967 (remember punch cards? ), so I'm working on my 5th decade. I usually try to keep my code on a normal screen or page, so I keep it around 80 characters wide, but sometimes I violate that guideline.
CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr., P. E. Comport Computing Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
Walt Fair, Jr. wrote:
Youngster! I wrote my first program in 1967 (remember punch cards? ), so I'm working on my 5th decade. I usually try to keep my code on a normal screen or page, so I keep it around 80 characters wide, but sometimes I violate that guideline.
First Program: 1965 First Computer: IBM 1620 First Language: Gotran (a simplified Fortran - only one operation per punch card) First printer: IBM golf ball typewriter Page Width: Whatever the flavour of the month is for my employer. 43 pay cheques to go!
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Whatever the other developer hasn't got, surely they have line wrap, the ingrates.
You really gotta try harder to keep up with everyone that's not on the short bus with you. - John Simmons / outlaw programmer.
I would have thought common sense was a pre-req for line wrap, in which case perhaps they don't.
Multi famam, conscientiam pauci verentur.(Pliny)
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I'm an 80 column "puncher" as well. I pretty sure the world would come to an end if I typed past column 80. For those that did not have the pleasure of using punch cards, you have to also understad that the keypunch machines rarely had a working ribbon in them so to insert new cards (or, heavan forbid you dropped the deck) you had to identify them by reading the semi-braille dents across the top or otherwise make sense of the pattern of punched out holes. Now for the bit switchers, here's[^] a nice video going though an Altair 8800 bootstrap to bring back a memory or two. Now that was an IDE. Deposit,
Robert Surtees wrote:
For those that did not have the pleasure of using punch cards, you have to also understad that the keypunch machines rarely had a working ribbon in them so to insert new cards (or, heavan forbid you dropped the deck) you had to identify them by reading the semi-braille dents across the top or otherwise make sense of the pattern of punched out holes.
Luxury! We had the 'manual' card punches - normally requiring using two or three fingers per character (up to 6 if using EBCDIC) directly pushing the punches that made the holes; later models included a mechanism that forwarded the card to the next column after you released the punches; there were no printing capabilities. You only found out if you'd used the correct finger combinations when the deck came back with the lineprinter listing (approx a fortnight later). Even that was better than using coding sheets - sent to the punch room to be mispunched, so you'd send the same data again to be mispunched again. I'm still a youngster to computing - only about 37 years of coding experience (started late in life). I started with paper tape - I cut my own strips of paper, sellotaped the lengths then punched the holes with a knitting needle, being careful to ensure that the holes lined up. After that, cards punched using a mechanical machine were a breeze.
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Printing is no issue to me; I've got a 24" HP plotter, so any page up to 150' wide is no trouble. ;P My screen is somewhat more limited, however.
"A Journey of a Thousand Rest Stops Begins with a Single Movement"
I'm shocked at you, Roger, making size boasts in the Lounge.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
Hi, I use different computers, different monitor widths, and I hate scrolling horizontally all the time, so I prefer not to exceed some 90 characters on a line; I use 4-space tabs and told Visual to show guide lines by adding a registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VCSExpress\9.0\Text Editor (adjust as required) Add a string called “Guides”, set its value to RGB(255,0,0) 80,96 BTW: my printing code will take care of lines that exceed the page width. FWIW: I don't want wide code snippets when composing a message here! :)
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [My Articles]
The quality and detail of your question reflects on the effectiveness of the help you are likely to get. Show formatted code inside PRE tags, and give clear symptoms when describing a problem.
modified on Sunday, May 17, 2009 6:32 PM
That is really neat. I never worry about the width though, usually the first (80/96/132/500/however many characters fit on your screen) give me enough of an idea of what's going on with that line that I don't need the rest of it unless I am sure there is something wrong with it and need to debug that particular line. Like you, when I print VS2008 wraps the text that's too wide. Maybe it would be just as well for anyone concerned to turn on the word wrap in the IDE which in VS2008 can be done at Tools -> Options, under Text Editor, All Languages, General under the Settings section.
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Me too. :)
Anna :rose: Having a bad bug day? Tech Blog | Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "If mushy peas are the food of the devil, the stotty cake is the frisbee of God"
We've got a guy in our group named Mr. Object. All of his function calls use simple line wrap with no indentation for parameters, which makes his code look more like a Victorian novel than software. Fortunately, he became the boss a while back, and he doesn't write a lot of code these days :-D.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
We've got a guy in our group named Mr. Object. All of his function calls use simple line wrap with no indentation for parameters, which makes his code look more like a Victorian novel than software. Fortunately, he became the boss a while back, and he doesn't write a lot of code these days :-D.
Software Zen:
delete this;Ugh.
Anna :rose: Having a bad bug day? Tech Blog | Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "If mushy peas are the food of the devil, the stotty cake is the frisbee of God"
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Robert Surtees wrote:
For those that did not have the pleasure of using punch cards, you have to also understad that the keypunch machines rarely had a working ribbon in them so to insert new cards (or, heavan forbid you dropped the deck) you had to identify them by reading the semi-braille dents across the top or otherwise make sense of the pattern of punched out holes.
Luxury! We had the 'manual' card punches - normally requiring using two or three fingers per character (up to 6 if using EBCDIC) directly pushing the punches that made the holes; later models included a mechanism that forwarded the card to the next column after you released the punches; there were no printing capabilities. You only found out if you'd used the correct finger combinations when the deck came back with the lineprinter listing (approx a fortnight later). Even that was better than using coding sheets - sent to the punch room to be mispunched, so you'd send the same data again to be mispunched again. I'm still a youngster to computing - only about 37 years of coding experience (started late in life). I started with paper tape - I cut my own strips of paper, sellotaped the lengths then punched the holes with a knitting needle, being careful to ensure that the holes lined up. After that, cards punched using a mechanical machine were a breeze.
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Ugh.
Anna :rose: Having a bad bug day? Tech Blog | Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "If mushy peas are the food of the devil, the stotty cake is the frisbee of God"
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You young'uns ar spoiled by modern technology. I'm one of those old geezers still writing code, dangerously close to the 3 decade mark. I think John Simmons is older than me. He's angrier, i'm more dangerous ;) So, I'm contemplating a couple of s/w issues and one of those is - when to hit the return key? As I type this, I have to my left a 1920x1200 monitor connected to my 1920x1200 laptop. It seems to me a little silly to worry about any developer who might not have the same h/w rsources. To arbitrarily linebreak at 80, 132, or whatever seems a bit silly. Printing? Muahahahaaha.. come on. Thoughts?
Charlie Gilley Will program for food... Hurtling toward a government of the stupid, by the stupid, for the stupid we go. —Michelle Malkin This crap sandwich is all yours.... 2009 "Stimulus Bill"
c nuf said!
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
"How do you find out if you're unwanted if everyone you try to ask tells you to stop bothering them and just go away?" - Balboos HaGadol"It's a sad state of affairs, indeed, when you start reading my tag lines for some sort of enlightenment. Sadder still, if that's where you need to find it." - Balboos HaGadol
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Another useful registry hack is: Under the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0 key, you can create a DWORD UseMRUDocOrdering = 1. What this does is, when you select a tab in the editor, that tab moves to be the leftmost tab. This obviously keeps the most recently used files/designers visible in the editor. Only the least used fall off the end. Works in VS2008, VS2005 and their express versions. I like it, anyway.
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.”
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Now if we could just get a multirow tab strip, or have the tabs shrink to fit like in a browser...
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. -- Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Maybe in VS2010, now they are using the delights of WPF for the Editor?
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.”
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You young'uns ar spoiled by modern technology. I'm one of those old geezers still writing code, dangerously close to the 3 decade mark. I think John Simmons is older than me. He's angrier, i'm more dangerous ;) So, I'm contemplating a couple of s/w issues and one of those is - when to hit the return key? As I type this, I have to my left a 1920x1200 monitor connected to my 1920x1200 laptop. It seems to me a little silly to worry about any developer who might not have the same h/w rsources. To arbitrarily linebreak at 80, 132, or whatever seems a bit silly. Printing? Muahahahaaha.. come on. Thoughts?
Charlie Gilley Will program for food... Hurtling toward a government of the stupid, by the stupid, for the stupid we go. —Michelle Malkin This crap sandwich is all yours.... 2009 "Stimulus Bill"
I still break at 80 characters even though I have a 1920 × 1200 resolution display. I have a lot of panes opened under Visual Studio, but I don't like auto-hiding panes very much. I just leave everything in front of me at the same time. Maybe it’s a sign for me to get an ultra HD display[^]: the ones with 7680 × 4320 resolution. Then I can break after every thousand characters. :)
My GUID: ca2262a7-0026-4830-a0b3-fe5d66c4eb1d :) Now I can Google this value and find all my Code Project posts!
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isn't it all about readability? when was the last time you printed code?
cheers, Donsw My Recent Article : Backup of Data files - Full and Incremental
Yes, it is.
Anna :rose: Having a bad bug day? Tech Blog | Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "If mushy peas are the food of the devil, the stotty cake is the frisbee of God"
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You young'uns ar spoiled by modern technology. I'm one of those old geezers still writing code, dangerously close to the 3 decade mark. I think John Simmons is older than me. He's angrier, i'm more dangerous ;) So, I'm contemplating a couple of s/w issues and one of those is - when to hit the return key? As I type this, I have to my left a 1920x1200 monitor connected to my 1920x1200 laptop. It seems to me a little silly to worry about any developer who might not have the same h/w rsources. To arbitrarily linebreak at 80, 132, or whatever seems a bit silly. Printing? Muahahahaaha.. come on. Thoughts?
Charlie Gilley Will program for food... Hurtling toward a government of the stupid, by the stupid, for the stupid we go. —Michelle Malkin This crap sandwich is all yours.... 2009 "Stimulus Bill"
Anyone like me remember when we were restricted to a 132 character line length limit because that was the standard for line printers? The longer a line is, the more difficult it is to read. To keep program code effective, efficient, readable and elegant, lines should be kept short. If indenting keeps moving to the right, it helps elegance and readability to create a subroutine (if it doesn't affect performance).