Do away with the 79 char limit

[flying-sheep]

It makes sense for code to have a line length limit, but not for prose:

When editing a document with manual breaks, lines will either be constantly uneven or you will have to manually reflow whole paragraphs all the time, breaking diffs.

I propose to do one sentence per line, and break after commas in long composite sentences. This will be nice for diffs, and result in no useless manual reflowing.

[warsaw]

I disagree. PEPs are edited by the same people and in the same editing environments as code, so having such a limit makes it more compatible across disparate editing environments. E.g. lines which are too long can be autowrapped or syntax highlighted in a warning color.

TBH, it also always bothers me when I see Python documentation source files with too long lines.

[brettcannon]

I agree with Barry; I write PEPs in code editors for their reST support and so the lack of line breaks doesn't work. Plus I personally read plenty of PEPs in raw text form.

I think two PEP editors not in favour of the idea is enough to close this.

[flying-sheep]

i don’t get it, all editors support autowrap, right?

[gvanrossum]

Stop it. It's not going to change. (And no, autowrap isn't always on and doesn't always do the right thing.)

[flying-sheep]

how can it do the wrong thing, though?

[brettcannon]

If you wrap hard at the column limit with hyphens to get a justified look that can break words at bad points.

But it really doesn't matter as we are not changing this requirement/practice for other reasons as well (e.g. not requiring everyone to turn on auto-wrap), so please consider this issue closed.

[holdenweb]

I don't see what the problem is. Simply regard the unit of text as the paragraph. Line-oriented diffs aren't helpful, so I am with the editors on this. S

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On 12 Dec 2016, at 23:25, Brett Cannon ***@***.***> wrote: If you wrap hard at the column limit with hyphens to get a justified look that can break words at bad points. But it really doesn't matter as we are not changing this requirement/practice for other reasons as well (e.g. not requiring everyone to turn on auto-wrap), so please consider this issue closed. — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.