> To start off, something completely different.  Old FORTRAN programmers
All the files in the latex distribution are checked for the 72
character limit as part of the Makefile that makes up the
distribution. (A few files have longer lines for one reason or
another.) This was more important when unencoded mail was a major
distribution method. These days ftp/http, cdrom or just better mail
gateways mean that it is probably not so important, although we do
still check the files. Apart from distribution problems, long lines of
code are harder to read.

David