It's different if you're using a tool (e.g. pep8) to ensure coding style. You can tell it to ignore long lines, or you can configure it to have a "better" line

It's different if you're using a tool (e.g. pep8) to ensure coding style. You can tell it to ignore long lines, or you can configure it to have a "better" line length than 80. Telling it to ignore all long lines means absurdly long lines are accepted too, but configuring it for a particular number makes it a hard limit. The best option is to pick a number that is a good trade-off.