Vim Line Length

I happen to be a fan of the vi text editor. I also happen to be a fan of code style guidelines. And sometimes it is very handy to know if a line in your source code has gone over eighty characters long. Some style guides still recommend a max line length of eighty characters, a tradition dating all the way back to IBM punch cards, circa 1928. For an even more impressive feat of long term engineering influence look up how the size of Roman war chariots determined the size of NASA space shuttle booster rockets. But I digress.

To mark the characters which are over the eighty character limit, enter the following either within vim or in your .vimrc file.

:match ErrorMsg '\%>80v.\+'

I've noticed that some blogger templates tend to display fifty-five characters in a fixed width format (as in a <pre> block or <code>). To edit code which I plan to post on Blogger, I sometimes turn on

:match ErrorMsg '\%>55v.\+'

Varieties in Code Design

One of the interesting things about writing software is the myriad of ways to express what it is that you would like the computer to do. When designing a class, function, or something else, you can make the syntax looks just about any way you like. The real interesting bit, is when multiple people need to work on a large project together. Everyone needs to be able to understand the code, so it's probably a good idea if you agree on code conventions beforehand. All of the below would do equally well, but which is most clear?

x = a + 5;
x = a.plus(5);
x = 5.plus(a); (You could do this in Ruby/)
x = plus(a, 5);
plus(a, 5, x);
a.plus(5, x);
set(x, plus(5, x)); (This looks a bit like Lisp.)

The list goes on and on.

Tune in next time for simple Python web-server fun.