As the author of coding guidelines for my employer I have upped the line length from 80 to 132. Why this value? Well, like others pointed out, 80 is the length of many old hardware terminals. And 132 is as well! It's the line width when terminals are in wide mode. Any printer could also make hardcopies in wide mode with a condensed font.
The reason for not staying at 80 is that I rather
- prefer longer names with a meaning for identifiers
- not bother with typedefs for structs and enums in C (they are BAD, they HIDE useful information! Ask Peter van der Linden in "Deep C Secrets" if you don't believe it), so the code has more
struct FOO func(struct BAR *aWhatever, ...) than code of typedef fanatics.
and under these rules just 80 chars/line cause ugly line wraps more often than my eyes deem acceptable (mostly in prototypes and function definitions).
