[PLUG] 80 characters

Felix Lee felix.1 at canids.net
Thu Nov 6 02:25:03 UTC 2003


Carla Schroder <carla at bratgrrl.com>:
> I revere old technology dinosaurs, bless your saurian ole selves. I'm still=
> =20
> having trouble understanding why it is so difficult for a mail reader that =
> is=20
> so great in every other way to wrap text messages. Is the code not open? Ca=
> n=20

because emacs doesn't have an easy distinction between data and
presentation of data.  what you see is what's there, mostly.
emacs will wrap lines, but it doesn't wrap at word boundaries.
to get a buffer that looks word-wrapped, you have to insert
actual newline characters into the data (and redo it all whenever
the window width changes).

modifications like that tend to have all sorts of nontrivial
effects.  for instance, it makes it awkward to copy and paste
regions of text verbatim, which is an issue when the text has
some fixed format, like patches.  (instead of editing the data,
you can play games with things like text properties, but that has
problems too.)

generally, I don't like having too many layers of interpretation
between me and raw data.  the less processing involved, the fewer
surprises (and bugs).  which means I get to learn how to read
text that's been encoded oddly.  or just delete it unread when I
don't feel like puzzling it out.  most of the hard-to-read
messages are spam anyway.

sure, it's all fixable, but it's not really worth the effort yet.
I think the hard part of open-source software is convincing
maintainers to take a code change.  making your own mutant
version of a program is usually a losing proposition, since it
adds nontrivial amount of effort to every program update.
--




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