3 ms·

> Seriously. "cdr"? "endp"? Was there a Great Keystroke Shortage in the '60s? Well...yes? When jaw-dropping storage is a 1 MB hard disk, things like function n

> Seriously. "cdr"? "endp"? Was there a Great Keystroke Shortage in the '60s? Well...yes? When jaw-dropping storage is a 1 MB hard disk, things like function names really do make a difference, especially when they're called so frequently. For the same reason, C89 identifiers are only 6 characters long (and hence the C naming convention of things like "strdup" rather than "duplicateString").

tsotha 15y ago
Sure, because you can fit six characters in 32 bits. But still... those constraints are no longer with us, and there's a limited amount of historical cruft people learning a language today should have to deal with.
- codehalo 15y ago
  How do you fit 6 characters in 32 bits? What encoding / context? BTW, there was a Great Memory Shortage.
  - tsotha 15y ago
    Something like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Radix-50 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Radix-50