For me it's not just the length of the line but the level of indentation. I think wide indents are good for readability, so if you're using standard tabs and al

For me it's not just the length of the line but the level of indentation. I think wide indents are good for readability, so if you're using standard tabs and also sticking to 80 columns as a hard limit then you have only 64 characters to work with at two levels of indentation. Excessive indentation is a clue that you may want to refactor, but two levels is pretty common. 80 charcters starting at the point of indentation is more reasonable. At two levels of indenting, you might get out to 96 characters, which still fits comfortably in most GUI terminal windows.