this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
1018 points (97.1% liked)

Programmer Humor

32453 readers
1368 users here now

Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)

Rules:

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] ChickenLadyLovesLife 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 year 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.