[net.sources.bugs] long names in 'C' programs

geoff@boulder.UUCP (Geoffrey M. Clemm) (05/20/85)

The tone of this response is intended to match that of the original
posting.  If you dislike rude and mindless behaviour, 'j' this message.

In article <aicchi.476> ignatz@aicchi.UUCP (Ihnat) writes:
>All right, people...
>
>If you insist on making 'C' programs look like COBOL by using
>32,767 character names, the *very* least you can do is make the
>damn things unique in the first 7 characters, OK?

"Fer Crissakes", this "damn" "drivel" from that "intolerable"
"joker" Ihnat is "bloody" "annoying".
(All quoted words verbatim from Ihnat's posting).

Well, my compiler will only take single character identifiers, and any
program that uses longer ones is being verbose and non-portable (ask any
Basic programmer from the 1960's).

>(No, don't tell me that I can write or get a
>preprocessor program to mung the source--this makes debugging and
>understandability even more of a joke than it already is.)

Oh, you are concerned about "understandability".  And you can't see
the point in having names longer than 7 characters ?  Well, you see
there is a tradeoff between portability and understandability, and
some of us are more concerned about understandability than porting
to your compiler.