I am pretty sure there was a time when the number of letters in a variable name had a significant impact on memory consumption. Hence the old 8 letters cap. edi

I am pretty sure there was a time when the number of letters in a variable name had a significant impact on memory consumption. Hence the old 8 letters cap. edit: more like a C language-specific thing http://www2.its.strath.ac.uk/courses/c/subsection3_6_2.html http://www2.its.strath.ac.uk/courses/c/subsection3_6_2.html "Some old implementations of C only use the first 8 characters of a variable name." In this specific example I hold the position that the problems doesn't come from small variable names but from a lack of good documentation. Short variable names aren't a problem per se. For instance, most articles I read tend to define acronyms one time at the beginning of the corpus and then only use acronyms for a given idea/concept/reference. Writing good documentation is hard.