• bandwidthcrisis@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Leaning to program on 8-bit machines with 8k of RAM means that even today I abbreviate names.

    Plus it was accepted wisdom that shorter variable names were faster for the BASIC interpreter.

    • voxel@sopuli.xyz
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      8 months ago

      variables don’t make it to the compiled binary tho, except debug symbols of course if have those enabled (but deploying them to an embeeded system is a terrible idea, they can remain on the host system)

      oh you mean on not for

      • bandwidthcrisis@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Yeah for interpreted BASIC.

        But even after moving to writing assembly language on a separate PC devkit there was still the habit of using short names.

        I think that some assemblers had limits on name size.