To me the argument is not only technical.<p>Of course these days a convention based on 80x25 terminals is anachronistic. But there is also a good reason to limit the length of lines for readability and indeed in typography the practice is to limit lines to ~50-70 characters. Personally I try to stick to that when I code because I find it more readable, and it's not the same as automatic line wrapping.<p>In addition, unless you have heavily nested branches or loops with big-ish indentation, you don't often get to 80 characters anyway, which opens another discussion on whether code with 10 levels of nested 'if' or extra long sequences of boolean operators begs to be refactored.
Would be nice if editors displayed lines longer than the terminal width wrapped (like notepad/textpad/etc do for prose) but with the programming-language-appropriate indentation.
My 'personal standard' is 58 lines of 115 characters whenever I launch a new xterm.<p>Even then I often extend the width to 150 or more characters, depending on what I am doing.