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Expectations of complexity were much less in those days. Like, a programming language that is limited to 40 character variable names would be considered amateur
by Tehdasi 6y ago
Expectations of complexity were much less in those days. Like, a programming language that is limited to 40 character variable names would be considered amateur hour, but back in the day it was prolly considered luxuriant.
Also given the memory constraints, it also limited the amount of complexity you could put in your code.
- vidarh 6y agoMore than luxuriant. Commodore BASIC (effectively 6502 Microsoft BASIC under license with tweaks) on the C64 only looked at the first two characters of variable names. It allowed them to be longer (don't remember how long), but would ignore subsequent letters.
- guenthert 6y agoThis is getting off-track, but while the pitfalls of two relevant characters out of potentially many are obvious and only excusable due to technical limitation of the platform, insisting on more than 40 relevant characters is likewise contraproductive. Who (which human) will readily distinguish two character strings more than 40 characters in length sharing the first 40? I feel often the need to remind programmers, that they don't write code for the computer. The computer will make it obvious, whether it understands you or not. You write for the poor sod tasked to maintain your code three years from now, when you're at your next gig.
- panzagl 6y agoDoes namespacing count? com.mycompany.class.classfactory.factory.initializer.StaticGlobal Sure you can usually use import/aliasing to narrow it, but sometimes you just need to grab some random global from somewhere.