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* [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
@ 2020-11-05 22:10 Tyler Adams
  2020-11-06  0:39 ` Kevin Bowling
  2020-11-06  1:41 ` Larry McVoy
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 33+ messages in thread
From: Tyler Adams @ 2020-11-05 22:10 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

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Fun read and it's totally wild that people's emotional comfort with *text*
drives a lot of their love or hate of unix.

http://theody.net/elements.html

 Tyler

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 33+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
  2020-11-05 22:10 [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature Tyler Adams
@ 2020-11-06  0:39 ` Kevin Bowling
  2020-11-06  1:41 ` Larry McVoy
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 33+ messages in thread
From: Kevin Bowling @ 2020-11-06  0:39 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Tyler Adams; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

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On Thu, Nov 5, 2020 at 3:11 PM Tyler Adams <coppero1237@gmail.com> wrote:

> Fun read and it's totally wild that people's emotional comfort with *text*
> drives a lot of their love or hate of unix.
>
> http://theody.net/elements.html
>
>  Tyler
>
I would concur with the adaptation that the modern predictor of unix
aptitude is attention span (which is lessened for a number of societal
changes).  It takes a fair amount of delayed gratification to get
comfortable with unix. I was able to intuitively use Mac OS Classic at age
3, and I can see modern youth have the same young intuition for touch
devices. But unix takes a bit more discipline and only rewards those who
persevere.  I suspect that’s why modern tech employers like it.  They’ve
learned to pick up the cues for people that will perform well in roles that
require perseverance and holding a lot of mental context.

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* Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
  2020-11-05 22:10 [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature Tyler Adams
  2020-11-06  0:39 ` Kevin Bowling
@ 2020-11-06  1:41 ` Larry McVoy
  2020-11-06  5:04   ` John Cowan
  2020-11-06 21:10   ` Dave Horsfall
  1 sibling, 2 replies; 33+ messages in thread
From: Larry McVoy @ 2020-11-06  1:41 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Tyler Adams; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

That was a good read and a perspective on Unix that I've not seen before.
I sort of fit with the author's view, I like to read and I like to write.
I am much happier typing than clicking.

Don't get me wrong, I live on Linux and it has made some stuff pleasantly
clickable.  I use virtual desktops, I have 6 of them.  There are xterms 
in 5 out of 6, the last one has firefox.  I click but I mostly live in
terminal windows.  Which are all 80 columns because that's the right
width (I can go on and on about that).

On Fri, Nov 06, 2020 at 12:10:06AM +0200, Tyler Adams wrote:
> Fun read and it's totally wild that people's emotional comfort with *text*
> drives a lot of their love or hate of unix.
> 
> http://theody.net/elements.html
> 
>  Tyler

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 33+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
  2020-11-06  1:41 ` Larry McVoy
@ 2020-11-06  5:04   ` John Cowan
  2020-11-06  5:16     ` Steve Nickolas
                       ` (2 more replies)
  2020-11-06 21:10   ` Dave Horsfall
  1 sibling, 3 replies; 33+ messages in thread
From: John Cowan @ 2020-11-06  5:04 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Larry McVoy; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

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On Thu, Nov 5, 2020 at 8:41 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

I click but I mostly live in
> terminal windows.  Which are all 80 columns because that's the right
> width (I can go on and on about that).
>

Aw, c'mon.  You're going to tell us that the number of punch holes that IBM
could fit on a punch card in 1928 that was exactly the size of the dollar
bill used in the U.S. from 1862 to 1923 so that it could be stored in a
mechanical cash register is miraculously the Right Thing when it comes to
reading monospaced text on a screen?  I think that's asking a bit much of
ol' man Coincidence.



↓↓ 80-column .sig ↓↓

John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan@ccil.org
MEET US AT POINT ORANGE AT MIDNIGHT BRING YOUR DUCK OR PREPARE TO FACE
WUGGUMS

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* Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
  2020-11-06  5:04   ` John Cowan
@ 2020-11-06  5:16     ` Steve Nickolas
  2020-11-06  6:34     ` Rob Pike
  2020-11-06  6:37     ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
  2 siblings, 0 replies; 33+ messages in thread
From: Steve Nickolas @ 2020-11-06  5:16 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

On Fri, 6 Nov 2020, John Cowan wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 5, 2020 at 8:41 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
> I click but I mostly live in
>> terminal windows.  Which are all 80 columns because that's the right
>> width (I can go on and on about that).
>>
>
> Aw, c'mon.  You're going to tell us that the number of punch holes that IBM
> could fit on a punch card in 1928 that was exactly the size of the dollar
> bill used in the U.S. from 1862 to 1923 so that it could be stored in a
> mechanical cash register is miraculously the Right Thing when it comes to
> reading monospaced text on a screen?  I think that's asking a bit much of
> ol' man Coincidence.

I find 120x30 (the Windows 10 default) works a bit better, though I still 
consider 80x24/25 the "canonical" terminal size - because it's about the 
width of text on a printout (6.5" x 12 cpi = 78 characters).

-uso.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 33+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
  2020-11-06  5:04   ` John Cowan
  2020-11-06  5:16     ` Steve Nickolas
@ 2020-11-06  6:34     ` Rob Pike
  2020-11-06 13:20       ` Will Senn
  2020-11-06  6:37     ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
  2 siblings, 1 reply; 33+ messages in thread
From: Rob Pike @ 2020-11-06  6:34 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: John Cowan; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

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https://github.com/golang/go/commit/a625b919163e76c391f2865d1f956c0f16d90f83

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* Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
  2020-11-06  5:04   ` John Cowan
  2020-11-06  5:16     ` Steve Nickolas
  2020-11-06  6:34     ` Rob Pike
@ 2020-11-06  6:37     ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
  2020-11-06 15:06       ` Larry McVoy
                         ` (2 more replies)
  2 siblings, 3 replies; 33+ messages in thread
From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey @ 2020-11-06  6:37 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: John Cowan; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

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On Friday,  6 November 2020 at  0:04:28 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 5, 2020 at 8:41 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
>> I click but I mostly live in terminal windows.  Which are all 80
>> columns because that's the right width (I can go on and on about
>> that).
>
> Aw, c'mon.  You're going to tell us that the number of punch holes
> that IBM could fit on a punch card in 1928 that was exactly the size
> of the dollar bill used in the U.S. from 1862 to 1923 so that it
> could be stored in a mechanical cash register is miraculously the
> Right Thing when it comes to reading monospaced text on a screen?

I think you're jumping to conclusions.  The importance of 80
characters (for small values of 80) is that it's a comfortable text
width for human eyes.  Your message adheres to the rule, presumably
not because you were thinking of punched cards.

Was the US $ bill really that big in those days?

> I think that's asking a bit much of ol' man Coincidence.

Arguably the coincidence was the other way round.

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft mail program
reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA

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* Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
  2020-11-06  6:34     ` Rob Pike
@ 2020-11-06 13:20       ` Will Senn
  2020-11-06 15:07         ` Clem Cole
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 33+ messages in thread
From: Will Senn @ 2020-11-06 13:20 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

On 11/6/20 12:34 AM, Rob Pike wrote:
> https://github.com/golang/go/commit/a625b919163e76c391f2865d1f956c0f16d90f83 
> <https://github.com/golang/go/commit/a625b919163e76c391f2865d1f956c0f16d90f83>
Hilarious. I use fixed font - Monaco 14. But, 80 columns? not on your 
life. I hate wrapped text output, if I can avoid it. That said, I set my 
soft word wrap in the text editor at 72 :). My convention comes from 
early email though, not punched cards.

Will

-- 
GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462  7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 33+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
  2020-11-06  6:37     ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
@ 2020-11-06 15:06       ` Larry McVoy
  2020-11-06 15:18         ` Bakul Shah
                           ` (3 more replies)
  2020-11-06 17:05       ` Paul Winalski
  2020-11-06 17:13       ` Adam Thornton
  2 siblings, 4 replies; 33+ messages in thread
From: Larry McVoy @ 2020-11-06 15:06 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Greg 'groggy' Lehey; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

On Fri, Nov 06, 2020 at 05:37:25PM +1100, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> On Friday,  6 November 2020 at  0:04:28 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
> > On Thu, Nov 5, 2020 at 8:41 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> >
> >> I click but I mostly live in terminal windows.  Which are all 80
> >> columns because that's the right width (I can go on and on about
> >> that).
> >
> > Aw, c'mon.  You're going to tell us that the number of punch holes
> > that IBM could fit on a punch card in 1928 that was exactly the size
> > of the dollar bill used in the U.S. from 1862 to 1923 so that it
> > could be stored in a mechanical cash register is miraculously the
> > Right Thing when it comes to reading monospaced text on a screen?
> 
> I think you're jumping to conclusions.  The importance of 80
> characters (for small values of 80) is that it's a comfortable text
> width for human eyes.  

Exactly this.  I'm a very fast reader, easily 2-3x the average.  I read by
running my eyes down the middle of the page and get the left and right
from peripheral vision.  It's super fast but it doesn't work when you
get much bigger than 80 columns.

Even if you read normally, the wider it is, the more back and forth your
eyes do so less is more.

It's also why I'm fine with smaller screens, I tried the giant apple
displays and found that those required head movement along with eye
movement.

I'm lazy.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 33+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
  2020-11-06 13:20       ` Will Senn
@ 2020-11-06 15:07         ` Clem Cole
  2020-11-06 15:40           ` Will Senn
  2020-11-06 22:31           ` Dave Horsfall
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 33+ messages in thread
From: Clem Cole @ 2020-11-06 15:07 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Will Senn; +Cc: TUHS main list

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Will, I do still the same thing, but the reason for 72 for email being that
way is still card-based.  In FORTRAN the first column defines if the card
is new (a blank), a comment (a capital C), no zero a 'continuation' of the
last card.  But column 73-80 were 'special' and used to store sequence #s
(this was handy when you dropped your card deck, card sorters could put it
back into canonical order).  So characters in those columns were
typically ignored.   Thus when "Model 28 ASR" (a.k.a. ASR-28) created it
had 72 columns.  It's interesting that when its follow on the Model 33 was
created, it actually had 74, but most SW configured it to 72 [search for a
manual on bit savers or the like if you want the details].

IIRC, the original DEC 'Glass TTY' - the VT-05 was 72, but later
terminals like the VT-52 were 80 columns, as was the ADM 3A.

The one thing I will give the 'tyranny of 80-columns" is when I look at
code it starts to break that line size by a lot, I often think that is a
bell-weather of something that needs to be rewritten and simplified, and/or
the abstraction might not be right.   Like, most/many rules there >>are<<
often break exceptions, but when I do look code with really long lines, I
admit I am suspect.


Clem


On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 8:21 AM Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 11/6/20 12:34 AM, Rob Pike wrote:
> >
> https://github.com/golang/go/commit/a625b919163e76c391f2865d1f956c0f16d90f83
> > <
> https://github.com/golang/go/commit/a625b919163e76c391f2865d1f956c0f16d90f83
> >
> Hilarious. I use fixed font - Monaco 14. But, 80 columns? not on your
> life. I hate wrapped text output, if I can avoid it. That said, I set my
> soft word wrap in the text editor at 72 :). My convention comes from
> early email though, not punched cards.
>
> Will
>
> --
> GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462  7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF
>
>

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* Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
  2020-11-06 15:06       ` Larry McVoy
@ 2020-11-06 15:18         ` Bakul Shah
  2020-11-06 15:19         ` Chris Torek
                           ` (2 subsequent siblings)
  3 siblings, 0 replies; 33+ messages in thread
From: Bakul Shah @ 2020-11-06 15:18 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Larry McVoy; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

On Nov 6, 2020, at 7:06 AM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Nov 06, 2020 at 05:37:25PM +1100, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
>> On Friday,  6 November 2020 at  0:04:28 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
>>> On Thu, Nov 5, 2020 at 8:41 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> I click but I mostly live in terminal windows.  Which are all 80
>>>> columns because that's the right width (I can go on and on about
>>>> that).
>>> 
>>> Aw, c'mon.  You're going to tell us that the number of punch holes
>>> that IBM could fit on a punch card in 1928 that was exactly the size
>>> of the dollar bill used in the U.S. from 1862 to 1923 so that it
>>> could be stored in a mechanical cash register is miraculously the
>>> Right Thing when it comes to reading monospaced text on a screen?
>> 
>> I think you're jumping to conclusions.  The importance of 80
>> characters (for small values of 80) is that it's a comfortable text
>> width for human eyes.  
> 
> Exactly this.  I'm a very fast reader, easily 2-3x the average.  I read by
> running my eyes down the middle of the page and get the left and right
> from peripheral vision.  It's super fast but it doesn't work when you
> get much bigger than 80 columns.
> 
> Even if you read normally, the wider it is, the more back and forth your
> eyes do so less is more.
> 
> It's also why I'm fine with smaller screens, I tried the giant apple
> displays and found that those required head movement along with eye
> movement.
> 
> I'm lazy.

In Acme almost always I use variable width font but I still adjust column
width to 80 (for a monospaced font). That way on a full screen on MBP
I get a number of regular width columns and one narrow one which I use
to keep my to do list or to note key points. 80 columns is a compromise
that allows  one to make better use of the screen real estate. I format text
or comments in narrower columns so that you can read straight down
instead of zigaziing down. Switching columns implies switching context.

Lazyness is the mother of invention!

Not sure what this has to do with "Unix as Literature"!

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 33+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
  2020-11-06 15:06       ` Larry McVoy
  2020-11-06 15:18         ` Bakul Shah
@ 2020-11-06 15:19         ` Chris Torek
  2020-11-06 16:46           ` Stephen Clark
  2020-11-06 18:51         ` Jon Steinhart
  2020-11-06 22:12         ` Andy Kosela
  3 siblings, 1 reply; 33+ messages in thread
From: Chris Torek @ 2020-11-06 15:19 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

>> I think you're jumping to conclusions.  The importance of 80
>> characters (for small values of 80) is that it's a comfortable text
>> width for human eyes.  

>Exactly this.

Yes -- this is the (or at least "an") argument for two-column text
on wide (8.5x11 or A4, or larger) paper pages.

>It's also why I'm fine with smaller screens, I tried the giant apple
>displays and found that those required head movement along with eye
>movement.

>I'm lazy.

I am too, but I still use a big screen: I just fit a lot of
smaller windows in it.  I'd like to have a literal wall screen,
especially if I'm in an interior, windowless (as in physical glass
windows) room, so that part of the wall could be a "window"
showing a view "outside" (real time, or the ocean, or whatever)
and other parts of the wall could be the text I'm working on/with,
etc.

(But I'll make do with these 27" 4k displays. :-) )

Chris

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 33+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
  2020-11-06 15:07         ` Clem Cole
@ 2020-11-06 15:40           ` Will Senn
  2020-11-06 15:46             ` Chris Torek
  2020-11-06 22:31           ` Dave Horsfall
  1 sibling, 1 reply; 33+ messages in thread
From: Will Senn @ 2020-11-06 15:40 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Clem Cole; +Cc: TUHS main list

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Clem,

It figures. I should have known there was a reason for the shorter lines 
other than display. Conventions are sticky and there appears to be a 
generation gap. I use single spaces between sentences, but my ancestors 
used 2... who knows why? :).

Will

On 11/6/20 9:07 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
> Will, I do still the same thing, but the reason for 72 for email being 
> that way is still card-based.  In FORTRAN the first column defines if 
> the card is new (a blank), a comment (a capital C), no zero a 
> 'continuation' of the last card.  But column 73-80 were 'special' and 
> used to store sequence #s (this was handy when you dropped your card 
> deck, card sorters could put it back into canonical order).  So 
> characters in those columns were typically ignored.   Thus when "Model 
> 28 ASR" (a.k.a. ASR-28) created it had 72 columns. It's interesting 
> that when its follow on the Model 33 was created, it actually had 74, 
> but most SW configured it to 72 [search for a manual on bit savers or 
> the like if you want the details].
>
> IIRC, the original DEC 'Glass TTY' - the VT-05 was 72, but later 
> terminals like the VT-52 were 80 columns, as was the ADM 3A.
>
> The one thing I will give the 'tyranny of 80-columns" is when I look 
> at code it starts to break that line size by a lot, I often think that 
> is a bell-weather of something that needs to be rewritten and 
> simplified, and/or the abstraction might not be right.   Like, 
> most/many rules there >>are<< often break exceptions, but when I do 
> look code with really long lines, I admit I am suspect.
>
>
> Clem
>
>
> On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 8:21 AM Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com 
> <mailto:will.senn@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     On 11/6/20 12:34 AM, Rob Pike wrote:
>     >
>     https://github.com/golang/go/commit/a625b919163e76c391f2865d1f956c0f16d90f83
>     <https://github.com/golang/go/commit/a625b919163e76c391f2865d1f956c0f16d90f83>
>
>     >
>     <https://github.com/golang/go/commit/a625b919163e76c391f2865d1f956c0f16d90f83
>     <https://github.com/golang/go/commit/a625b919163e76c391f2865d1f956c0f16d90f83>>
>     Hilarious. I use fixed font - Monaco 14. But, 80 columns? not on your
>     life. I hate wrapped text output, if I can avoid it. That said, I
>     set my
>     soft word wrap in the text editor at 72 :). My convention comes from
>     early email though, not punched cards.
>
>     Will
>
>     -- 
>     GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462  7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF
>


-- 
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* Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
  2020-11-06 15:40           ` Will Senn
@ 2020-11-06 15:46             ` Chris Torek
  2020-11-06 22:54               ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 33+ messages in thread
From: Chris Torek @ 2020-11-06 15:46 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

>I use single spaces between sentences, but my ancestors 
>used 2... who knows why? :).

Typewriters.

In typesetting, especially when doing right-margin justification,
we have "stretchy spaces" between words.  The space after end-of-
sentence punctuation marks is supposed to be about 50% larger than
the width of the between-words spaces, and if the word spaces get
stretched, so should the end-of-sentence space.  Note that this is
all in the variable-pitch font world.

Since typewriters are fixed-pitch, the way to emulate the
1.5-space-wide gap is to expand it to 2.

Chris

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 33+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
  2020-11-06 15:19         ` Chris Torek
@ 2020-11-06 16:46           ` Stephen Clark
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 33+ messages in thread
From: Stephen Clark @ 2020-11-06 16:46 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

On 11/6/20 10:19 AM, Chris Torek wrote:
>>> I think you're jumping to conclusions. The importance of 80
>>> characters (for small values of 80) is that it's a comfortable text
>>> width for human eyes.
>> Exactly this.
> Yes -- this is the (or at least "an") argument for two-column text
> on wide (8.5x11 or A4, or larger) paper pages.
>
>> It's also why I'm fine with smaller screens, I tried the giant apple
>> displays and found that those required head movement along with eye
>> movement.
>> I'm lazy.
> I am too, but I still use a big screen: I just fit a lot of
> smaller windows in it. I'd like to have a literal wall screen,
> especially if I'm in an interior, windowless (as in physical glass
> windows) room, so that part of the wall could be a "window"
> showing a view "outside" (real time, or the ocean, or whatever)
> and other parts of the wall could be the text I'm working on/with,
> etc.
>
> (But I'll make do with these 27" 4k displays. :-) )
>
> Chris
Could the 72 characters come from the original terminal ASR 33 Teletype?

The Model 33 printed on 8.5-inch (220 mm) wide paper, supplied on continuous 
5-inch (130 mm) diameter rolls and fed via friction (instead of, e.g., tractor 
feed). It printed at a fixed 10 characters per inch, and supported 74-character 
lines,[13] although 72 characters is often commonly stated.

-- 


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 33+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
  2020-11-06  6:37     ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
  2020-11-06 15:06       ` Larry McVoy
@ 2020-11-06 17:05       ` Paul Winalski
  2020-11-06 17:07         ` Larry McVoy
  2020-11-06 17:13       ` Adam Thornton
  2 siblings, 1 reply; 33+ messages in thread
From: Paul Winalski @ 2020-11-06 17:05 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Greg 'groggy' Lehey; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

On 11/6/20, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@lemis.com> wrote:
>
> Was the US $ bill really that big in those days?

Yes, it was.  IIRC, the modern, smaller bills first went into
circulation in the 1930s.

There's an episode of the Beverly Hillbillies based on the old dollar
bill size.  Jed Clampett's uncle didn't trust banks and in the 1920s
had been burying mason jars full of dollar bills in his backyard.
Most were the old-style, punch card-size bills.  He tells Drysdale the
banker that his uncle has "big money".  Drysdale of course thinks that
if Jed Clampett the millionaire thinks it's big money, that uncle must
be very rich, indeed....

-Paul W.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 33+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
  2020-11-06 17:05       ` Paul Winalski
@ 2020-11-06 17:07         ` Larry McVoy
  2020-11-06 17:25           ` Warner Losh
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 33+ messages in thread
From: Larry McVoy @ 2020-11-06 17:07 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Paul Winalski; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

On Fri, Nov 06, 2020 at 12:05:38PM -0500, Paul Winalski wrote:
> On 11/6/20, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@lemis.com> wrote:
> >
> > Was the US $ bill really that big in those days?
> 
> Yes, it was.  IIRC, the modern, smaller bills first went into
> circulation in the 1930s.
> 
> There's an episode of the Beverly Hillbillies based on the old dollar
> bill size.  Jed Clampett's uncle didn't trust banks and in the 1920s
> had been burying mason jars full of dollar bills in his backyard.
> Most were the old-style, punch card-size bills.  He tells Drysdale the
> banker that his uncle has "big money".  Drysdale of course thinks that
> if Jed Clampett the millionaire thinks it's big money, that uncle must
> be very rich, indeed....

That's hilarious, I missed that joke when watching as a kid.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 33+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
  2020-11-06  6:37     ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
  2020-11-06 15:06       ` Larry McVoy
  2020-11-06 17:05       ` Paul Winalski
@ 2020-11-06 17:13       ` Adam Thornton
  2020-11-06 17:26         ` Stephen Clark
  2 siblings, 1 reply; 33+ messages in thread
From: Adam Thornton @ 2020-11-06 17:13 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Greg 'groggy' Lehey; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

I’m going to chime in on pro-80-columns here, because with the text a comfortable size to read (although this is getting less true as my eyes age), I can read an entire 80-column line without having to sweep my eyes back and forth.

I can’t, and never could, do that at 132.

As a consequence, I read much, much faster with 80-column-ish text blocks.

I also think there is something to the “UNIX is verbal” and “UNIX nerds tend to be polyglots often with a surprising amount of liberal arts background of one kind or another,” argument.  That may, however, merely be confirmation bias.

Adam

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 33+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
  2020-11-06 17:07         ` Larry McVoy
@ 2020-11-06 17:25           ` Warner Losh
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 33+ messages in thread
From: Warner Losh @ 2020-11-06 17:25 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Larry McVoy; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 988 bytes --]

On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 10:08 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 06, 2020 at 12:05:38PM -0500, Paul Winalski wrote:
> > On 11/6/20, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@lemis.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > Was the US $ bill really that big in those days?
> >
> > Yes, it was.  IIRC, the modern, smaller bills first went into
> > circulation in the 1930s.
> >
> > There's an episode of the Beverly Hillbillies based on the old dollar
> > bill size.  Jed Clampett's uncle didn't trust banks and in the 1920s
> > had been burying mason jars full of dollar bills in his backyard.
> > Most were the old-style, punch card-size bills.  He tells Drysdale the
> > banker that his uncle has "big money".  Drysdale of course thinks that
> > if Jed Clampett the millionaire thinks it's big money, that uncle must
> > be very rich, indeed....
>
> That's hilarious, I missed that joke when watching as a kid.
>

Wow! Me too! Google confirmed the size changed in th 20s as a cost cutting
measure.

Warner

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 33+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
  2020-11-06 17:13       ` Adam Thornton
@ 2020-11-06 17:26         ` Stephen Clark
  2020-11-06 18:24           ` John Cowan
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 33+ messages in thread
From: Stephen Clark @ 2020-11-06 17:26 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Adam Thornton, Greg 'groggy' Lehey; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

On 11/6/20 12:13 PM, Adam Thornton wrote:
> I’m going to chime in on pro-80-columns here, because with the text a comfortable size to read (although this is getting less true as my eyes age), I can read an entire 80-column line without having to sweep my eyes back and forth.
>
> I can’t, and never could, do that at 132.
>
> As a consequence, I read much, much faster with 80-column-ish text blocks.
>
> I also think there is something to the “UNIX is verbal” and “UNIX nerds tend to be polyglots often with a surprising amount of liberal arts background of one kind or another,” argument.  That may, however, merely be confirmation bias.
>
> Adam
May have had to do with the first terminal commonly used with UNIX.

The Model 33 printed on 8.5-inch (220 mm) wide paper, supplied on continuous 
5-inch (130 mm) diameter rolls and fed via friction (instead of, e.g., tractor 
feed). It printed at a fixed 10 characters per inch, and supported 74-character 
lines,[13] although 72 characters is often commonly stated.


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 33+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
  2020-11-06 17:26         ` Stephen Clark
@ 2020-11-06 18:24           ` John Cowan
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 33+ messages in thread
From: John Cowan @ 2020-11-06 18:24 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: sclark46; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1174 bytes --]

On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 12:26 PM Stephen Clark <sclark46@earthlink.net>
wrote:


> May have had to do with the first terminal commonly used with UNIX.
>
> The Model 33
>

In fact the Labs had the more recent Model 37, which did lower case, unlike
the 33.  Consequently, Unix was (I think) the first case-sensitive
operating system.  However, it had to work on 33s as well; if you tried to
log in using an uppercase username, login would turn on the IUCLC and OLCUC
bits of /dev/tty, and if you needed an uppercase letter you had to escape
it (I think with \), which the tty driver processed.

Thanks to everyone for filling in all the gaps in the chain from dollar
bills to 80-column terminal windows that I had left implicit.  To clarify
my position, what I am opposed to is not the use of 80-column windows for
*reading* email.  I'm not happy with what happens to text that is
hard-wrapped at 80 columns when displayed in a narrower window, as often
happens to me now that I use larger fonts than I used to.  The
text/format-flowed MIME type was supposed to help with this problem, but
never really caught on.



"Well, I'm back."  --Sam        John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 33+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
  2020-11-06 15:06       ` Larry McVoy
  2020-11-06 15:18         ` Bakul Shah
  2020-11-06 15:19         ` Chris Torek
@ 2020-11-06 18:51         ` Jon Steinhart
  2020-11-06 22:09           ` John Cowan
  2020-11-06 22:12         ` Andy Kosela
  3 siblings, 1 reply; 33+ messages in thread
From: Jon Steinhart @ 2020-11-06 18:51 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

Larry McVoy writes:
> On Fri, Nov 06, 2020 at 05:37:25PM +1100, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> > On Friday,  6 November 2020 at  0:04:28 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
> > > On Thu, Nov 5, 2020 at 8:41 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > >
> > >> I click but I mostly live in terminal windows.  Which are all 80
> > >> columns because that's the right width (I can go on and on about
> > >> that).
> > >
> > > Aw, c'mon.  You're going to tell us that the number of punch holes
> > > that IBM could fit on a punch card in 1928 that was exactly the size
> > > of the dollar bill used in the U.S. from 1862 to 1923 so that it
> > > could be stored in a mechanical cash register is miraculously the
> > > Right Thing when it comes to reading monospaced text on a screen?
> > 
> > I think you're jumping to conclusions.  The importance of 80
> > characters (for small values of 80) is that it's a comfortable text
> > width for human eyes.  
>
> Exactly this.  I'm a very fast reader, easily 2-3x the average.  I read by
> running my eyes down the middle of the page and get the left and right
> from peripheral vision.  It's super fast but it doesn't work when you
> get much bigger than 80 columns.
>
> Even if you read normally, the wider it is, the more back and forth your
> eyes do so less is more.
>
> It's also why I'm fine with smaller screens, I tried the giant apple
> displays and found that those required head movement along with eye
> movement.

We're getting into religion again here, and I've never found that to be a
sound basis for policy.  I'm going to quote liberally here from a screed
that I wrote (but have not published) when trying to understand parts of
the linux kernel.

I've always been willing to spend buckets of money on the monitors because
to me that's an area where bigger and higher resolution is always better.
I've been using 132 column terminal windows since sometime in the 90s when
I got myself a monster 24" Trinitron monitor from Sun.  I seem to recall
that it listed for $3,300, thanks to the unnamed person who got me the
employee discount :-)  I tried going to 160 columns but that was too wide
for the monitors that people I worked with had.

I hated Shakespeare in high school.  One of the big reasons was that I felt
that he made up a word whenever he didn't have a good one available.  The
flipping back and forth to the list of definitions completely interrupted
the cadence of reading.  The insistence on short line lengths in coding
standards and the contortions that people go through to meet them has the
same effect for me.

I've coined the phrase "mental locality of reference" to describe this; at
least I think that I'm the first one to use it.  Short lines and modern coding
styles ask the human brain to contort itself in ways that we are loath to ask
hardware to do.

As near as I can tell, the belief that people do best with line lengths between
50 and 75 characters long is the result of people repeating "wisdom" that they
heard from someone else that orginates from what I consider to be a misreading
of Emil Ruder's book "Typographie: A Manual of Design".  While Ruder does make
this statement about line length, it's in the context of normal typography.
It does not even remotely consider computer code where long lines are long
mainly due to leading whitespace.  To the best of my knowledge nobody has
studied this - does the line length when counting begin at the first column or
the first non-whitespace character?

While readers might "lose focus" part of the way through long lines, that has to
be balanced against the loss of focus that comes from 'mental carriage-returns"
when text is too narrow and broken across several lines.  Again, not studied as
far as I know.

The linux coding standard makes the unsubstantiated claim that having more than
three levels of indent is a problem.  And it's really hard to understand,
because on one hand, it says that you "should fix your program", and then says
that "nesting functions too deep" is a problem.  Sounds like a catch-22 to me;
how are you going to minimize indent if you can't nest functions?  I'm guessing
that someone typed this without reading what they wrote and really meant
"statements", not "functions".

We're back to the mental locality-of-reference thing that was mentioned earlier.
I'd much rather have a few more levels of indent and longer lines than have to
go chasing gratuitous function calls.  Think about every diversion from the
stuff in front of you as a cache miss.

When I look at the linux kernel code, I see incredibly bad contortions made in
attempts to meet the coding style.  I also observed that the code only loosely
follows its coding style.  How are people limiting their code to three indent
levels?  By including dozens of header files that contain static inline
functions.  Gak!  I feel that style rules should be observed in some sort of
priority order, and mental locality of reference, which isn't in anybody's
rules but mine, is at the top of the list.

I could go on, but hopefully I've made my point.

Jon

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 33+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
  2020-11-06  1:41 ` Larry McVoy
  2020-11-06  5:04   ` John Cowan
@ 2020-11-06 21:10   ` Dave Horsfall
  1 sibling, 0 replies; 33+ messages in thread
From: Dave Horsfall @ 2020-11-06 21:10 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

On Thu, 5 Nov 2020, Larry McVoy wrote:

> Don't get me wrong, I live on Linux and it has made some stuff 
> pleasantly clickable.  I use virtual desktops, I have 6 of them.  There 
> are xterms in 5 out of 6, the last one has firefox.  I click but I 
> mostly live in terminal windows.  Which are all 80 columns because 
> that's the right width (I can go on and on about that).

Almost all of my xterms are 80 cols for the same reason, but I do have one 
that is about 160 cols for things like "sdiff" etc.  Or if I'm feeling 
nostalgic I'll use 120 cols :-)

They are also mostly 24 rows, except for a couple of 40-row ones for email 
(more context) and source editing (ditto).

I was brought up on 80x24 (along with a status line which could be 
addressed either with an escape sequence or the "25th row") so it feels 
"right" for me (we'll ignore the 72x20 VT-05 for now).

-- Dave

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 33+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
  2020-11-06 18:51         ` Jon Steinhart
@ 2020-11-06 22:09           ` John Cowan
  2020-11-06 22:44             ` Jon Steinhart
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 33+ messages in thread
From: John Cowan @ 2020-11-06 22:09 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Jon Steinhart; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2347 bytes --]

On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 1:51 PM Jon Steinhart <jon@fourwinds.com> wrote:


> I've always been willing to spend buckets of money on the monitors because
> to me that's an area where bigger and higher resolution is always better.
>

You'd hardly want one the size of a city block, or even of a room wall.

> I hated Shakespeare in high school.  One of the big reasons was that I felt
> that he made up a word whenever he didn't have a good one available.


Contrary to Internet opinion, Shakespeare probably never invented any
words.  At most he is the first person to record in writing a word whose
written works have survived (mostly).  Why would a commercial playwright
(and Shakespeare wrote for money) use a word his audience didn't
understand?   They'd boo the play off the stage, with or without rotten
fruit.  He did both invent and reuse a lot of phrases: see <
https://inside.mines.edu/~jamcneil/levinquote.html>, or google for "you are
quoting Shakespeare".

The
> flipping back and forth to the list of definitions completely interrupted
> the cadence of reading.
>

Pop-up translations would be much better, of course.  I studied R&J with
footnotes; my daughter, with an across-the-page translation into
Contemporary Modern English.  Of course, that meant I had to explain some
of the gallows humor to her, like Mercutio's dying words: "Seek for me
tomorrow, and you will find me a *grave* man."

> While readers might "lose focus" part of the way through long lines, that
> has to
> be balanced against the loss of focus that comes from 'mental
> carriage-returns"
> when text is too narrow and broken across several lines.  Again, not
> studied as
> far as I know.
>

Lispers, of course, have only one kind of bracket, and append as many
close-brackets to each line as are needed there.  (We don't count them,
Emacs and vi do the matching.)  Sure saves on vertical whitespace, which
means you typically can see a whole function in one screen.



John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan@ccil.org
Is a chair finely made tragic or comic? Is the portrait of Mona Lisa
good if I desire to see it? Is the bust of Sir Philip Crampton lyrical,
epical or dramatic?  If a man hacking in fury at a block of wood make
there an image of a cow, is that image a work of art? If not, why not?
                --Stephen Dedalus

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 33+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
  2020-11-06 15:06       ` Larry McVoy
                           ` (2 preceding siblings ...)
  2020-11-06 18:51         ` Jon Steinhart
@ 2020-11-06 22:12         ` Andy Kosela
  2020-11-06 22:23           ` Larry McVoy
  3 siblings, 1 reply; 33+ messages in thread
From: Andy Kosela @ 2020-11-06 22:12 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Larry McVoy; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

On 11/6/20, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> It's also why I'm fine with smaller screens, I tried the giant apple
> displays and found that those required head movement along with eye
> movement.

Exactly.  I never understood all the fuss about those huge LCD screens
in front of your eyes.  A few years ago I used a real VT220 (12" in
size) for my daily job in the office and it was perfect for command
line work.

At home I use a lot of Digital text terminals and PC DOS era CRT
monitors and they are really great for what they were made for.  Text
mode can't get any better than 720x400 on 14" CRT monitor.  For
graphical mode I still love 640x480 -- everything is big enough for
me.  The 70s, 80s and 90s got a lot of things right.  The introduction
of widescreen LCD monitors around 2007 ruined a lot of things.

And of course the 80 columns output is the only right choice.  It
especially makes sense if you are still using text mode only CRT
monitors, like I do.

--Andy

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 33+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
  2020-11-06 22:12         ` Andy Kosela
@ 2020-11-06 22:23           ` Larry McVoy
  2020-11-07  0:16             ` Dave Horsfall
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 33+ messages in thread
From: Larry McVoy @ 2020-11-06 22:23 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Andy Kosela; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

On Fri, Nov 06, 2020 at 11:12:23PM +0100, Andy Kosela wrote:
> The 70s, 80s and 90s got a lot of things right.  The introduction
> of widescreen LCD monitors around 2007 ruined a lot of things.

Yeah, I wasn't a fan of going wider.  I'm bucking the old school trend
and typing on an 80x44 terminal which is as tall as I can go on my X1
Carbon.  It's big enough.

For me, taller is more useful than wider, provided I can get about 162
columns so I can do side by side diffs.  More than that doesn't do much
for me.

But I'm pretty old school, I write in C, I debug a lot with printf and
asserts, I'm kind of a dinosaur.  In the last year or so I reconnected
with Kirk and Eric and much to my surprise, and pleasure, I found that
Eric and I see things very similarly, I'd be happy to work with/for that
guy, we really agree.

One thing I will say about big monitors is they are great for photos.
I do a lot of digital photography and have no desire to go back to 
black & white or CRT terminals.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 33+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
  2020-11-06 15:07         ` Clem Cole
  2020-11-06 15:40           ` Will Senn
@ 2020-11-06 22:31           ` Dave Horsfall
  2020-11-06 23:41             ` Warren Toomey
  1 sibling, 1 reply; 33+ messages in thread
From: Dave Horsfall @ 2020-11-06 22:31 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 429 bytes --]

[ Getting into COFF territory here, I think ]

On Fri, 6 Nov 2020, Clem Cole wrote:

> But column 73-80 were 'special' and used to store sequence #s (this was 
> handy when you dropped your card deck, card sorters could put it back 
> into canonical order).

We used to grab a wide felt-tip pen and draw a diagonal stripe across the 
top of the deck; at least that got you started.

-- Dave, who has dropped the occasional deck

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 33+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
  2020-11-06 22:09           ` John Cowan
@ 2020-11-06 22:44             ` Jon Steinhart
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 33+ messages in thread
From: Jon Steinhart @ 2020-11-06 22:44 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

John Cowan writes:
> On Fri, Nov 6, 2020 at 1:51 PM Jon Steinhart <jon@fourwinds.com> wrote:
>
> > I've always been willing to spend buckets of money on the monitors because
> > to me that's an area where bigger and higher resolution is always better.
>
> You'd hardly want one the size of a city block, or even of a room wall.
>
> > I hated Shakespeare in high school.  One of the big reasons was that I felt
> > that he made up a word whenever he didn't have a good one available.
>
> Contrary to Internet opinion, Shakespeare probably never invented any
> words.  At most he is the first person to record in writing a word whose
> written works have survived (mostly).  Why would a commercial playwright
> (and Shakespeare wrote for money) use a word his audience didn't
> understand?   They'd boo the play off the stage, with or without rotten
> fruit.  He did both invent and reuse a lot of phrases: see <
> https://inside.mines.edu/~jamcneil/levinquote.html>, or google for "you are
> quoting Shakespeare".
>
> The
> > flipping back and forth to the list of definitions completely interrupted
> > the cadence of reading.
>
> Pop-up translations would be much better, of course.  I studied R&J with
> footnotes; my daughter, with an across-the-page translation into
> Contemporary Modern English.  Of course, that meant I had to explain some
> of the gallows humor to her, like Mercutio's dying words: "Seek for me
> tomorrow, and you will find me a *grave* man."
>
> > While readers might "lose focus" part of the way through long lines, that
> > has to
> > be balanced against the loss of focus that comes from 'mental
> > carriage-returns"
> > when text is too narrow and broken across several lines.  Again, not
> > studied as
> > far as I know.
>
> Lispers, of course, have only one kind of bracket, and append as many
> close-brackets to each line as are needed there.  (We don't count them,
> Emacs and vi do the matching.)  Sure saves on vertical whitespace, which
> means you typically can see a whole function in one screen.

As I said in my original post, we're getting into religion here.

So we have different views on monitors; I am contemplating replacing my 32"
UHD monitor with a 70" UHD TV.  Why?  Because I can keep everything on my
screen the same which will make everything bigger so I can put the monitor
farther away getting me out of my farsighted zone and into my 20-20 range
which would eliminate the need for glasses.

Not gonna rathole on the Shakespeare analogy - maybe I'm wrong but it's
not relevant to the point that I was making.  The books that we were given
in high school didn't have pop-up translations or footnotes.

In case I wasn't clear in my original posting, the topic was mental locality
of reference issues as related to terminal size and coding style.

Jon

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 33+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
  2020-11-06 15:46             ` Chris Torek
@ 2020-11-06 22:54               ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
  2020-11-06 23:29                 ` Steffen Nurpmeso
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 33+ messages in thread
From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey @ 2020-11-06 22:54 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Chris Torek; +Cc: tuhs

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1064 bytes --]

On Friday,  6 November 2020 at  7:46:57 -0800, Chris Torek wrote:
>> I use single spaces between sentences, but my ancestors
>> used 2... who knows why? :).
>
> Typewriters.
>
> In typesetting, especially when doing right-margin justification,
> we have "stretchy spaces" between words.  The space after end-of-
> sentence punctuation marks is supposed to be about 50% larger than
> the width of the between-words spaces, and if the word spaces get
> stretched, so should the end-of-sentence space.

FWIW, this is the US convention.  Other countries have different
conventions.  My Ausinfo style manual states

  There is no need to increase the amount of punctuation ... at the
  end of a sentence.

I believe that this also holds for Germany.  I'm not sure that the UK
didn't have different rules again.

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft mail program
reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA

[-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --]
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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 33+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
  2020-11-06 22:54               ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
@ 2020-11-06 23:29                 ` Steffen Nurpmeso
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 33+ messages in thread
From: Steffen Nurpmeso @ 2020-11-06 23:29 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Greg 'groggy' Lehey; +Cc: tuhs

Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote in
 <20201106225422.GD99027@eureka.lemis.com>:
 |On Friday,  6 November 2020 at  7:46:57 -0800, Chris Torek wrote:
 |>> I use single spaces between sentences, but my ancestors
 |>> used 2... who knows why? :).
 |>
 |> Typewriters.
 |>
 |> In typesetting, especially when doing right-margin justification,
 |> we have "stretchy spaces" between words.  The space after end-of-
 |> sentence punctuation marks is supposed to be about 50% larger than
 |> the width of the between-words spaces, and if the word spaces get
 |> stretched, so should the end-of-sentence space.
 |
 |FWIW, this is the US convention.  Other countries have different
 |conventions.  My Ausinfo style manual states
 |
 |  There is no need to increase the amount of punctuation ... at the
 |  end of a sentence.
 |
 |I believe that this also holds for Germany.  I'm not sure that the UK
 |didn't have different rules again.

Yes, the DUDEN of Germany says for typewriters that the
punctuation characters period, comma, semicolon, colon, question-
and exclamation mark are added without separating whitespace.  The
next word follows after a space ("Leerschritt", "void step"). 
However, typewriters often place(d) those characters left in
a cell, so that the visual appearance is accordingly.

In novels around 66 characters is the recommendation i seem to
recall.  I have that in mails, 72 in other text modes, and 79 for
everything else.  (The latter lead to lots of ugly code once
i used tabulators, but different tabulator spacing would have
resulted in different look in $PAGER and $VISUAL, so ...)

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 33+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
  2020-11-06 22:31           ` Dave Horsfall
@ 2020-11-06 23:41             ` Warren Toomey
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 33+ messages in thread
From: Warren Toomey @ 2020-11-06 23:41 UTC (permalink / raw)
  Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

On Sat, Nov 07, 2020 at 09:31:08AM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> [ Getting into COFF territory here, I think ]

Yes all, we've drifted out of Unix and into old fart territory, so
please move over to coff@tuhs.org for future replies!

Thanks, Warren

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 33+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
  2020-11-06 22:23           ` Larry McVoy
@ 2020-11-07  0:16             ` Dave Horsfall
  2020-11-08 23:23               ` George Michaelson
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 33+ messages in thread
From: Dave Horsfall @ 2020-11-07  0:16 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society; +Cc: Computer Old Farts Followers

[ Moving to COFF (if your MUA respects "Reply-To:") ]

On Fri, 6 Nov 2020, Larry McVoy wrote:

> But I'm pretty old school, I write in C, I debug a lot with printf and 
> asserts, I'm kind of a dinosaur.

You've never experienced the joy of having your code suddenly working when 
inserting printf() statements?  Oh dear; time to break out GDB...

-- Dave

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 33+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
  2020-11-07  0:16             ` Dave Horsfall
@ 2020-11-08 23:23               ` George Michaelson
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 33+ messages in thread
From: George Michaelson @ 2020-11-08 23:23 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Computer Old Farts Followers; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

A lot of industrial design is based on inheritance. The nitrocellulose
filmstock was nominal 40mm, after cutting and sprockets it was 35. cut
it in half you have 16mm single sprocket. Original manufacture was 80
wide cut in half so undo that and you get 70mm. run the film sideways,
you now have 700 high for IMAX dimensions. Why was nitrocellulose film
stock coming in 80mm wide strips? Ask somebody who knows what George
Eastman was doing at the time... My guess is the tank emitted 100mm
but the edges were crinkly, and 80mm was what he got after slicing
ragged margins. The rest is inheritance down the stack working on 1/2
and 1/4 sizing consequences.

IBM was business machines. tabulators. The sheet stock it used for
things in business was defined by what it could source coming in,
reliably. The US census used hollerith cards, this is probably why the
fed reserve used hollerith cards. (My G/F got a 1978 tax cheque refund
from a camp school in the midwest on a hollerith-card-cheque, the last
time I saw one in anger outside of the computer labs where we were
still using them in anger, very anger)

the Banks first atm's used card stock for receipts. they were
mini-hollerith. I imagine because they understood how to do alignment
from a cut corner, and had machinery which worked.

I was told that fmt/72 is a post-hoc rationalisation to allow for 4-5
levels of indentation in >>>quoting. I think this is a post-hoc
rationalisation of a prompter hoc reality. If you go back into
teletype deep history, I bet you find 40/60/72 was coming out of some
combination of fixed-width typeface, mechanics, and paper stock sizes
available in the supply chain.

(Mike Lesk told me the TBL offset in the T/ROFF box drawing was
because of a highly specific throwback effect in the printer at Bell.
The code was adjusted to deal with this, and the rest of us had to
wear the top and bottom lines being misplaced without a patch to the
code. This kind of thing, its classic "because we could, and because
it works" decision logic)

On Sat, Nov 7, 2020 at 10:17 AM Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:
>
> [ Moving to COFF (if your MUA respects "Reply-To:") ]
>
> On Fri, 6 Nov 2020, Larry McVoy wrote:
>
> > But I'm pretty old school, I write in C, I debug a lot with printf and
> > asserts, I'm kind of a dinosaur.
>
> You've never experienced the joy of having your code suddenly working when
> inserting printf() statements?  Oh dear; time to break out GDB...
>
> -- Dave

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 33+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2020-11-08 23:24 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 33+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2020-11-05 22:10 [TUHS] The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature Tyler Adams
2020-11-06  0:39 ` Kevin Bowling
2020-11-06  1:41 ` Larry McVoy
2020-11-06  5:04   ` John Cowan
2020-11-06  5:16     ` Steve Nickolas
2020-11-06  6:34     ` Rob Pike
2020-11-06 13:20       ` Will Senn
2020-11-06 15:07         ` Clem Cole
2020-11-06 15:40           ` Will Senn
2020-11-06 15:46             ` Chris Torek
2020-11-06 22:54               ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2020-11-06 23:29                 ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2020-11-06 22:31           ` Dave Horsfall
2020-11-06 23:41             ` Warren Toomey
2020-11-06  6:37     ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2020-11-06 15:06       ` Larry McVoy
2020-11-06 15:18         ` Bakul Shah
2020-11-06 15:19         ` Chris Torek
2020-11-06 16:46           ` Stephen Clark
2020-11-06 18:51         ` Jon Steinhart
2020-11-06 22:09           ` John Cowan
2020-11-06 22:44             ` Jon Steinhart
2020-11-06 22:12         ` Andy Kosela
2020-11-06 22:23           ` Larry McVoy
2020-11-07  0:16             ` Dave Horsfall
2020-11-08 23:23               ` George Michaelson
2020-11-06 17:05       ` Paul Winalski
2020-11-06 17:07         ` Larry McVoy
2020-11-06 17:25           ` Warner Losh
2020-11-06 17:13       ` Adam Thornton
2020-11-06 17:26         ` Stephen Clark
2020-11-06 18:24           ` John Cowan
2020-11-06 21:10   ` Dave Horsfall

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