[seqfan] Re: Three lines, or 260 characters?

[Charles Greathouse]

Short answer: 260 characters including spaces and commas.

Of course this rule is flexible in cases where there is special
interest in showing more terms (perhaps some important feature is
first shown just beyond the boundary), but that's the basic rule of
thumb.

Charles Greathouse
Analyst/Programmer
Case Western Reserve University

On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 1:23 AM, Matthew Vandermast
<ghodges14 at comcast.net> wrote:
> Hello SeqFans,
>
> How long should the standard sequence be? It seems there may be a conflict between 1. the "three lines" standard and 2. the "260 characters (including spaces)" standard.
>
> 1. The Style Sheet's "How many terms do we need?" section implicitly requests "enough terms to fill three lines on the screen, about 200 characters..."  https://oeis.org/wiki/Style_Sheet#How_many_terms_do_we_need.3F
> I believe that when Neil wrote this, he meant "digits plus commas" by "characters." (In my experience, the old limit used to be about 70 digits+commas in each of the internal format's three lines.  Other people may have had different experiences.)
>
> 2. The programs on the Sequence Tools page (https://oeis.org/wiki/Sequence_Tools) cut down a sequence to 260 characters, but at least some of those programs count spaces as characters. So there's not always enough sequence to fill three lines.  For example, the "U" line here is about half empty: https://oeis.org/edit?seq=A212174&internal=1.
>
> Sometimes there is less empty space than this.  In other words, apparently some of the 260-character programs don't produce output that is a constant length in the database.
>
> I'm just wondering if either of these effects were consciously intended, or if perhaps there was a miscommunication somewhere. (For example: Is it possible that somewhere, an administrator recommended 260 characters as the new standard length for a sequence, but *without* counting spaces as characters?) Thanks for any clarification.
>
> Regards,
> Matt Vandermast
>
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