We all saw that “Cambridge University” jumbled words paragraph that got spammed around the internet.
“I cnduo’t bvleiee taht I culod aulaclty uesdtannrd waht I was rdnaieg”

If nothing else it really highlights that we can work on word shape alone.

I’d love to try and express this differently, as “avoid lines longer than x words” or “Avoid having more than X words over Y characters long”. Or at the very least; having trim()’d the preceeding whitespace avoid having a line < 85 characters.

It looks strange but you get used to it. Most of my constructors look like this:

$this
->setFoo($foo)
->setBar($bar)
->setBaz($baz);

And if your object model is good you hardly need really long names.

$h = $fooBarBazGirGumpWhatever->getHandles();
$h->barzoinkadings->close();
$h ->wallawallahoi->close();
$h->redoplasma->close();

is more readable then

$foo->getBarzoinkadingsHandle()->closeHandle();
$foo->getWallawallahoiHandle()->closeHandle();
$foo->getBarzoinkadingsHandle()->closeHandle();


I’ve seen this happening a few times.
Limiting the line lengths sometimes brings more problems than solutions.

This is an amazing piece of writing, in terms of its functionality and with high points for literary style! As a traditional “writer” by profession, who is just learning php, this type of well-reasoned and grammatically-inclined approach is exactly what I was craving (and having a very hard time finding. I wound up following an electronic breadcrumb trail to your site starting with a link in the book “SAMS Teach Yourself PHP in 10 Minutes,” that led to pear.php.net). I will be devouring every word on your site!

-Paula Parisi

In other words, a deeply indented line that contains 65 spaces and 18 alphanumeric characters would be perceived by a human as 18 characters, but by a computer as 83 characters. Perhaps code formatting utilities should ignore white space?