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From: karl@haddock.ISC.COM (Karl Heuer)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: Messages with >80-character lines
Message-ID: <1455@haddock.ISC.COM>
Date: Wed, 21-Oct-87 17:29:43 EDT
Article-I.D.: haddock.1455
Posted: Wed Oct 21 17:29:43 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 24-Oct-87 08:01:15 EDT
References: <7523@g.ms.uky.edu> <21314@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <7526@g.ms.uky.edu> <4756@oberon.USC.EDU> <7541@e.ms.uky.edu>
Reply-To: karl@haddock.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer)
Organization: Interactive Systems, Boston
Lines: 35

In article <7541@e.ms.uky.edu> david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- Resident E-mail Hack) writes:
>In article <4756@oberon.USC.EDU> blarson@skat.usc.edu (Bob Larson) writes:
>>A possible example would be to put a \ in column 80 to indicate that the
>>next line is really part of the current line.
>
>Bad example.  Suppose a Makefile is posted which has a line exactly 80
>characters long with a \ as the last character ...

Then, by this convention, the first 79 characters would be displayed on the
first line, followed by a \ for continuation, and the 80th character (\) would
appear alone on the second line.  Completely unambiguous, although ugly.

>Personally I don't like the idea of using VERY VERY long lines anyway.
>It looks ugly and like the person doesn't know how to use their editor
>very well.

Well, the suggestion was that the newsreading program should know how to
display it properly.

>... For another case, what will happen to the above quotations if they get
>automatically-formatted on display?  Won't they stop looking like quotations?

Again, not if the newsreader formatter is smart.  The quoted text would look
like ">very long line of text\n" internally, but would display as if it were
">very\n>long\n>line\n>of text\n\n".  More generally, the internal format
should be something like ">\{margin}very long line of text\{para}" so that
strings other than ">" can be properly replicated.

(Btw, I use a similar convention when writing C programs.  I try to avoid
breaking a line just because it's getting close to the margin -- the person
reading the code may have a different screen width or tab stops.  Now someone
just needs to write an editor that will display such long lines in a more
conventional format.)

Karl W. Z. Heuer (ima!haddock!karl or karl@haddock.isc.com), The Walking Lint