bug#47775: First line length and GNU coding standards....

[Marco Antoniotti]

Hi

Many years ago we had 80 columns and that was a GOOD THING!

It is such a good thing that the GNU Coding Standards (and not only them), unless I remember incorrectly, ask for 80 columns of code.

Also many years ago, and on this I may be wrong, it was also said that the

-*- Mode: ... -*-

line could appear within the first 10 (am I remembering right?) lines of a file.

Now, in https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Library-Headers.html

it is said that the FIRST line of a elisp file must start like this:

;;; foo.el --- Support for the Foo programming language  -*- lexical-binding: t; -*-

especially if you want lexical binding, which is NOT turned on if the setting is NOT in the first line.

Now, this is not exactly a bug, but for many years (I am an old guy), I wrote code with a separate header line containing only Emacs local buffer customizations.  And the Lisp-Headers "suggestion" quickly runs afoul of the 80 column coding standard.  Moreover, things like checkdoc (and therefore flycheck) become a bit annoying if you do not follow suit.

Bottom line, this is just a bit of a rant, but I really like my (and, I believe, many other old geezers') style of having something like

;;; -*- Mode: Emacs-Lisp; lexical-binding: t; some-var-with-a-long-name: t -*-
;;; foo.el --- The foo pkg, which also happens to have description 79 col long.

I know it's 2021, but I still like the 80 columns.

Anything that can be done about it?

All the best

Marco

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Marco Antoniotti, Associate Professor         tel. +39 - 02 64 48 79 01
DISCo, Università Milano Bicocca U14 2043 http://dcb.disco.unimib.it
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