OT: You'll have to read this more than once...

[Gib Bogle]

According to a recent survey, "recent survey" jokes are becoming more popular.

[Bob Eager]

What ext to speech system do you use, Brian?

[John Rumm]

One of the oddities of dyslexia being that I can read that just as easily as normal text...

[Tim Streater]

So can I, and I'm not dyslexic at all.

[Jon Fairbairn]

It?s nothing to harp on about tuba honest.

[The Medway Handyman]

And 87% (of 68 women asked) would agree.

[Clive Page]

That is cool, but one can abbreviate words even more and the sense still comes through. Many years ago I used the Forth programming language for a job: it stored variable names as just the first three characters with a character-count in the 4th byte. This attracted some criticism. Here is the response by Chuck Moore (president of Forth Inc) to a letter published in a programming magazine:

"Dea- Edi-, I am afr- tha- the let- in the las- iss- abo- For- Inc usi- onl- thr- let- nam- fie- has had the opp- eff- fro- wha- the wri- wan-."

[Tim Streater]

Ha ha how witty. Of course it is only possible to interpret the above because of context. Try writing software using short variable names and see how you get on. Or, rather, find a place to hide when the person subsequently tasked with maintaining that code comes after you with a machete.

[RayL12]

+1

[RayL12]

That's the beauty of high level programming languages; debugging.

I use to program in mnemonics and rather than read code as a set of objectives, I would read it is a journey through the architecture.

[Andy Champ]

I recall running quality tests through our Pascal compiler. It had checks in it specifically to catch this kind of shortcut - spotting things like tail saving. The checks would have things like two variable ThisIsVeryLongVariableNameThatShould12ConfuseMostCompilers and ThisIsVeryLongVariableNameThatShould21ConfuseMostCompilers - even the checksum is the same.

Andy

[usenet2013xxa]

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hth

[Mark]

That reminds me of compilers that would allow variable names of any length but only take the first 8? characters as significant.

[Bob Eager]

Reminds me of the Elliott ALGOL compiler (yes, a very long time ago). It only checked the first 5 characters of the reserved words.

A colleague was dyslexic, and he *always* wrote UNTILL rather than UNTIL. It wasn't until we got a new machine (and a new compiler) that he realised.

[John Rumm]

Like CORAL 66[1] implementations first 12 characters are significant, but can have embedded spaces in the names....

a n other variable is the same as another variable is the same as anothervariawhatnot

[1] ALGOL inspired language - superficially is like Pascal with the good bits taken out. Popular at one time in real time / defense / avionics circles.