> But breaking the statement arbitrarily at some point > seems more like saying that you have to end a sentence > at the end of each line, whether the sente

> But breaking the statement arbitrarily at some point > seems more like saying that you have to end a sentence > at the end of each line, whether the sentence is finished > or not because, you know, that's the way it's always been > done. (I know it's not a perfect analogy.) Isn't it more like line-breaking sentences at the edge of a paper page, which we do, and which is perfectly reasonable because of the page's fixed size? Sure, you can design your document for a different paper size, but then you have to reconfigure the printer for that size, make sure you have the right paper size loaded in the printer (and change it back afterwards!), get new envelopes in the new size, get new binders... Similarly, if I read a program wider than 80 characters, I have to resize my terminal window and my Emacs window. When I then switch to working on other programs in the same windows, those programs then tend to be infected by wider-than-80-character lines, unless I remember to resize things back to normal, which in turn perpetuates the problem. So either the applications would have to constantly resize themselves when I switch between files (which seems really annoying) or we could just decide to stick to the standard 80 columns which, as many comments here have pointed out, is a reasonable choice to standardize on even if it's arbitrary.