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Great writeup, full of sharp details. In the 90's I worked on a FoxPro application, also for DoD. My boss, a retired Navy Captain, used very terse variable na
by gavinpc 10y ago
Great writeup, full of sharp details.
In the 90's I worked on a FoxPro application, also for DoD. My boss, a retired Navy Captain, used very terse variable names, partly because he was a hunt-and-peck typist, and partly because earlier languages allowed only two-character names.
But FoxPro allowed variable names of any length. However, it only recognized the first ten characters. To my boss's chagrin, I often used names longer than ten characters, risking collisions with other long names. That never happened.
But ten years after leaving, I was hired to port the product to Visual FoxPro, which does recognize the whole name. Some of the early commits were "Fixed inconsistently-used long variable name..."
Of course, in those days we weren't using linters, or tests, or source control, or reproducible builds... and yet still had a business. No wonder Alan Kay calls computing "not quite a field."
- foota 10y agoHearing that absolutely terrifies me like?? Silently allowing names to collide in that way just sounds ridiculous to me.
- Roboprog 10y agoMany early 90s C compilers did much the same thing, though the limit was usually around 32 chars, rather than merely 10.
- Roboprog 10y agoI remember in college in the mid 80s trying to get something to work on one of the Apple IIs in the library in BASIC, only to discover that my earlier experience with the disk based interpreter supported 6 char names, but the ROM based interpreter only recognized the first 2 chars, but would accept longer names it would not differentiate. Hilarity ensues... And, yeah, I also did a lot of XBase in the late 80s, though usually "Clipper", rather than "Fox". Batch files made a decent build process, and you could be disciplined with regular arc/zip files for source - not too unlike "make clean" and svn. We certainly had a lot of cruddy manual processes otherwise back then, though.