PIEBALDconsult wrote:
That is not an option on a VT screen.
What year was the most recent VT terminal released? Wikipedia describes the 1993 VT520 (i.e. 30 years ago), discontinued 10 years later (20 years ago). I doubt that there were later VT screens. According to Wikipedia, the 1987 VT320 (and its successors) could display 132 chars/line, leaving room for 62 chars of end-of-line comments starting at col 70. In the age of non-graphic, character oriented screens, it was commonplace for editors to provide a command to move the window to the right by, say, 20 or 40 characters. For the first generation of character screens, the entire screen had to be redrawn. More 'recent' models provided escape sequences for moving the contents in a line buffer (in the terminal) to the right or left, so only the new part had to be transmitted. Editors of the time fine-tuned their output to the terminal model in use, to reduce data transmitted.
Similarly, some systems such as Oracle's PRO*C put a limit on line lengths.
They can't possibly have had a limit less than 132! I worked with editors having a 256 char limit, some time in the 1980s. I googled 'Oracle PRO*C', and was sent to the documentation for version 12.1; it seems to be released in 2014. At that time, the 'Precompiler options' documentation for MAXLITERAL states The maximum value of MAXLITERAL is compiler dependent. For example, some C compilers cannot handle string literals longer than 512 characters, so you would specify MAXLITERAL=512. This is a (semi-)reasonable limit, but not one preventing you from using end-of-line comments! The limit may of course have been lower in earlier years (e.g. 256), but if a compiler couldn't process a source file that could be printed on 'any' line printer of the day, it must be classified as a toy compiler. (Besides, for EOL comments, the compiler sets no limits - the preprocessor strips off all comments, EOL or otherwise! So the limitation would be in the preprocessor, and I doubt very much that it had any limit affecting EOL comments.) A note from modern times (5-6 years ago): The company I worked for was revising its C coding rules. The working group had suggested that all source files be limited to a maximum of 80 characters. At the meeting where this proposal was presented, my project leader immediately jumped up and declared that our project would have an exemption from this rule. The main reason: We had
