long identifiers

[David Adrien Tanguay]

In article <1990Oct25.182246.27505 at nntp-server.caltech.edu> bruce at seismo.gps.caltech.edu (Bruce Worden) writes:
>hp at vmars.tuwien.ac.at (Peter Holzer) writes:
>> [ .... ] [ from Henry Spencer's Ten Commandments... ]
>>9.	Thy external identifiers shall be unique in the first six 
>>	characters, though this harsh discipline be irksome and the 
>>	years of its necessity stretch before thee seemingly without 
>>	end, lest thou tear thy hair out and go mad on that fateful 
>>	day when thou desirest to make thy program run on an old system.
>>
>>IMHO you should write your program readable, and long identifiers add a lot
>>to readability.
>
>I don't think Mr. Spencer is trying to tell you to restrict your identifiers
>to six characters, but to make them unique in the first six characters.

My primary development environment is a Honeywell running GCOS, with the
6 character caseless restriction in effect. Despite this, I would rather
see programs with suitable identifiers. It's fairly easy to fix any
problems with long identifiers. The big problems in porting software to
this system are byte size assumptions, pointer format assumptions, and
"all the world's a Unix" library assumptions. A port usually involves lots
of rewriting, and the extra readability of longer identifiers makes it
easier to do this rewriting.


-- 
David Tanguay            Software Development Group, University of Waterloo