Re: What's the line length limit in the Emacs codebase?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Philipp Stephani <p.stephani2@gmail.com>
> Date: Sat, 26 Dec 2020 12:09:17 +0100
> Cc: Emacs developers <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> 
> > You are counting long strings and lines with long URLs?  Is that
> > reasonable?
> 
> If you look at emacs.c, you'll see lots of lines that are not long
> URLs etc., but e.g. comment blocks that could easily be reflowed, and
> I was wondering why that didn't happen when these comments were
> introduced.

History, I suppose.  I usually reformat any comment line around the
code I change when it's too long.  It's a slow process.

> Just to give some context, I became aware of this when editing various
> parts of the Emacs codebase while having the fill column indicator
> enabled. I then realized that large parts of the code seem to use an
> 80-column limit, while others seem to use a 70-column limit, and I was
> wondering why that's the case.

The value of fill-column is not for judging the length of code lines,
it's for comments and strings.  Code lines can use 80 lines, provided
that they are broken in reasonable places, and that the continuation
lines are indented consistently with the code structure.