"Limit all lines to a maximum of 79 characters"

[ichabod801]

I do put effort into keeping code to a certain length, but I use 108 characters instead. Lines that are too long can be hard to understand, so I just use it as a guide for when I should break a line up to make it more readable. But I think 79 is too few characters, especially with indentation being a part of the language. I mean, in a class method with a loop and a conditional, you are now down to 63 characters. And that just encourages short variable names, making the code less readable. So there's a bit of balance there.

Guido has also said that PEP 8 was never meant to be the coding style for everything written in Python. It was just meant for the standard library, and isn't even followed rigorously there (I'm looking at you, unittest).