1051
do as i say...
(lemmy.ca)
Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
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.
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 becauseFOR
andGET
are both keywords.FO
it is, then. Or justF
.COLOR
was cursed too;OR
is usually a keyword, even ifCOLOR
itself isn't. British EnglishCOLOUR
might save you here, but you're still losing those four extra bytes.