I think the name shortening is very common in practically every science - and when we are not restricted to ASCII it is even worse, you would see mostly single

I think the name shortening is very common in practically every science - and when we are not restricted to ASCII it is even worse, you would see mostly single letter names, combined with subscripts, superscripts, fonts, extra alphabets like Greek and so on. At least things like ifr_flags are easy to read, easy to type, and unique enough you ca search for them.