GUIDELINE 4.4
Line Width
ABAP_BACKGROUND
The maximum line width of an ABAP program is restricted to 255
characters. The editor allows you to write more than 255 characters, but
it breaks a line that contains more than 255 characters between two
tokens when you press Enter.
ABAP_RULE
Do not use full line width
Limit the width of a line in the source code to a reasonable size. As a
rule of thumb, you should be able to print a program on common paper
formats without truncation or line breaks.
ABAP_DETAILS
Whereas the old restriction to 72 characters was too strict, the full
utilization of the 255 characters that are now available would not make
a program any more legible. Although very large monitors are now
available, it can still be necessary, for example, for code inspections
or reviews, to print a program or program section. It is therefore
advisable to break long statements at
suitable positions and to distribute long literals across multiple lines
using the literal operator ( ) or the concatenation
operator ( ).
Note
The sample programs in the documentations are restricted in width in a
natural way, which makes them legible at the same time. Unfortunately
this sometimes means using shorter names
than would actually be possible.
Example
In the first method of the program
PGL_PROGRAM_LINE_WIDTH , a very long literal is assigned to the
return value. The literal is not displayed completely even on very wide
screens, and in the printout it will be broken up or even truncated.
The second method uses a literal whose content is identical to the one
of the previous method; here, however, it is composed of multiple
shorter literals using the literal operator . The literal
is split at appropriate positions, and the method becomes more legible
both on the screen and the printout.
Documentation extract taken from SAP system, � Copyright SAP AG. All rights reserved