title: Studies on optimal code width?
body: <p>If you enable the "View Right Margin" in your IDE of choice, it is likely that it will default to 80 characters.  I tend to change it to 120 for no reason other than it was the standard at a company I was with a few years back, and no other company has told me to do it differently.</p>
  
  <p>My question is, are there any studies that actually show 80 characters to be the optimal maximum width for code readability, or is this value just a "that's the way it's always been" and no one really knows why it is that way?  And, should the width of a line of code be part of your coding standard?</p>