Those may be terrible variable names but they were understandable back in the 70s and 80s when disk space was at a premium and compilers only cared about the fi

Those may be terrible variable names but they were understandable back in the 70s and 80s when disk space was at a premium and compilers only cared about the first 6 characters in a variable or function name. That's the downside of a 50 or so year old programming language: you have to worry about not breaking legacy code that did things based on the hardware limitations of that time.