Re: Which code style do you prefer the most?

On 05/03/2025 22:02, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Wed, 5 Mar 2025 16:40:51 +0000, bart wrote:
 

People are forgetting that in the days of 80-character hardware,
identifiers were often limited to 6 characters or even fewer.

 COBOL allowed for 30 from the beginning, as I recall. And PL/I allowed 31.

So:
ADD AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA TO BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB GIVING CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC.
? A tight fit for an 80-column card I think.
I think linker symbols were more limited; on DEC typically 6 characters for example.
I suspect the 30 characters were as a much of an arbitrary implementation limit as my 255; you wouldn't supposed to get anywhere near it.

Whatever it was you meant by “80-character hardware” (see discussion
elsewhere) ...

Punched cards, teletypes and VDUs tended to use 72/80 columns. The first text display I owned used 64. I think home or small-business printers (not lineprinters) were based around 80 columns too (10cpi over 8 inches).