"Other purposes of criticism don't seem appropriate here" - on that I will take your word; you've demonstrated quite an aptitude for inappropriate criticism. "

"Other purposes of criticism don't seem appropriate here" - on that I will take your word; you've demonstrated quite an aptitude for inappropriate criticism. "Ridiculously huge" ? MaximumPhysicalAddress vs maxphysaddr, let's see, it is 22 vs 11 characters. Both are much longer than I'd want to type if speed or code byte size was a problem. For readability, the primary goal of all source code other than assembly (or code going out over-the-wire), it's not even close. If you really think maxphysaddr is as readable as MaximumPhysicalAddress, you hopefully recognize at least that not everyone would think that way. As for maxPA being ambiguous, well, yes. My point was that it's shorter. Perhaps one of the copied names programmers can use within their own expressions. Of course, they can use a find-replace and replace all those copies with MaximumPhysicalAddress in nearly an instant. Which is why it's probably the name I'd use unless I had to minimize byte size. If I had to minimize byte size, I would not waste time trying to compromise between length and readability. Otherwise I do not think there is ever a reason to compromise readability.