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."