Ah, one assumption I never like in this discussion: code will always be read via an editor. I've been flirting around with a literate programming environment,

Ah, one assumption I never like in this discussion: code will always be read via an editor. I've been flirting around with a literate programming environment, and it's been far easier to use spaces with a traditional line measure - around 80 chars. The code can be included into HTML or print layouts with few edits. That seems to be the "easy to layout" setup.