4 ms·
I worked at a company that used Mumps. They used some super-old interpreter that had a pretty low limit on the code size. The actual size of the source code.
by comice 10y ago
I worked at a company that used Mumps. They used some super-old interpreter that had a pretty low limit on the code size.
The actual size of the source code.
As the codebase grew, they had to shrink down the code to be able to fit it all in. Comments were the first to go. The end result was single letter variable and function names. The code was impenetrable!
Presumably this is no longer a limitation :)
- detaro 10y agoReminds me of how V8 used the length of a function's source code as a heuristic to decide if it should be inlined or not -> adding comments could slow down your JS. But of course JS already had code minifiers.
- bebop 10y agoThere was also a utility program that would take large source files and split them across multiple files. So you would end up with things like routine1_1.m routine1_2.m routine1_3.m and so on. Reading this with no comments and single letter variables and keywords was near impossible.