Why are cryptic short identifiers still so common in low-level programming?

Posted by romkyns on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by romkyns
Published on 2012-08-28T21:35:10Z Indexed on 2012/08/28 21:51 UTC
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naming

There used to be very good reasons for keeping instruction / register names short. Those reasons no longer apply, but short cryptic names are still very common in low-level programming.

Why is this? Is it just because old habits are hard to break, or are there better reasons?

For example:

Atmel ATMEGA32U2 (2010?): TIFR1 (instead of TimerCounter1InterruptFlag), ICR1H (instead of InputCapture1High), DDRB (instead of DataDirectionPortB), etc.
.NET CLR instruction set (2002): bge.s (instead of branch-if-greater.signed), etc.

Aren't the longer, non-cryptic names easier to work with?

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Why are cryptic short identifiers still so common in low-level programming? - Developer IT

Why are cryptic short identifiers still so common in low-level programming?

naming

Related posts about naming

Use Glassfish JMS from remote client

Naming conventions and field naming question for CakePHP

Python Naming Conventions for Dictionaries/Maps/Hashes

Naming PowerPoint Components With A VSTO Add-In

"Mac" vs "OS X" vs "Mac OS X"

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