To: J3 J3/22-145 From: Robert Corbett Subject: line length Reference: 22-007 Date: 2022-March-07 When I chose the new maximum line length for Fortran 202X, I assumed that the limit would be advisory, not mandatory. The committee chose to make the limit mandatory. I think the limit of 10,000 characters is too small for a mandatory limit. I suspect that the line limit will be exceeded by machine generated type declaration statements with large initializers. I have seen such codes in practice, where the lines have been folded after generation. Any limit will be too small for some codes, but a larger limit will not be reached as often. I propose increasing the line limit to 32,765 characters. I would be happy with another limit such as 30,000 characters. I would like the limit to be less than or equal to 32,766 characters, because I know of a debugging format that has such a limit. The company that uses that debugging format no longer produces a Fortran compiler, which does weaken that argument. An edit is provided. Edit ---- Subclause 6.3.2.1 "Free form line length", paragraph 1, [50:13] Replace "A line shall contain at most ten thousand characters." with "A line shall contain at most 32\thin765 characters."