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do as i say... (lemmy.ca)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
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[–] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

oftn th lang ony allwd shrt var nms

I started coding with TurboBasic which allowed variable names of any length but the compiler only looked at the first two letters (and case-insensitive at that), so DOUGHNUT_COUNT and DoobieCounter were actually the same variable. Good times debugging that kind of shit.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    Yeah, I was thinking of old 8-bit computers that did the same ignore-after-second-char thing. Most people didn't bother typing the extra characters though because 1) those characters took up valuable memory and 2) if you accidentally put a keyword in the middle of your longer name, the tokeniser would see it and assume it was a keyword.

    e.g. Calling your variable FORGET seemed like a good idea until you got a syntax error because FOR and GET are both keywords. FO it is, then. Or just F.

    COLOR was cursed too; OR is usually a keyword, even if COLOR itself isn't. British English COLOUR might save you here, but you're still losing those four extra bytes.

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