In the Nineties, I inherited a massive code base written in FORTRAN. You try to make sense of a system in which all identifiers, whether function names or variables, have to be at most 8 characters. Or bytes, same thing, we didn’t have anything but ASCII.
My favorite thing from the past was TurboBasic. Variable names could be any length BUT: the compiler only looked at the first two letters of the variable and wasn’t case-sensitive. So variables NAME_COUNT and NauticalDistance were actually the same fucking variable. Good times debugging that kind of shit.
In the Nineties, I inherited a massive code base written in FORTRAN. You try to make sense of a system in which all identifiers, whether function names or variables, have to be at most 8 characters. Or bytes, same thing, we didn’t have anything but ASCII.
My favorite thing from the past was TurboBasic. Variable names could be any length BUT: the compiler only looked at the first two letters of the variable and wasn’t case-sensitive. So variables
NAME_COUNTandNauticalDistancewere actually the same fucking variable. Good times debugging that kind of shit.id var prefix
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