This is mostly wrong. Longer variable names never significantly affected the time to run a compiler. Back in the day the run time for compilers was mostly deter

This is mostly wrong. Longer variable names never significantly affected the time to run a compiler. Back in the day the run time for compilers was mostly determined by the overhead to load in each overlay (the whole compiler didn't fit in memory). That said, often there was a hard limit on the length of identifiers that wasn't terribly long (e.g. 8 characters), so very verbose names were not possible. The more obvious reasons for preferring short variable names are: 1. It's more like math, and for simple code looks nicer, and the descriptive variable name mafia were still in diapers and 2. typing was slow and painful, so was editing (use an ASR-33 with 'ed' to find out how painful). What your greybeard might have been talking about was to do with interpreted languages where the interpreter had to parse through the code in some situations when performing a jump/goto. This meant that the more characters there were between the jump origin and destination, the slower execution was. I remember this being a factor in early 8-bit BASIC implementations, leading to a desire to make programs as terse as possible to achieve fast execution. Later implementations tokenized the source before execution, avoiding that problem.