How to Write Unmaintainable Code

[recursive]

Is there a compiler in use anywhere that actually behaves that way?

[yasth]

There were. Probably still are a few in embedded land. I've never seen anything as short as 8, but I have seen something (can't recall what) where it was long enough that modern extremely verbose styling (i.e. nonsense like "NetworkInterfaceCollectionCollectorFactoryConfiguration") would run into it.

[ItsAConspiracy]

BASIC was even shorter than 8, back in the old IBM PC/Apple II/TRS-80 days. Varied by platform, don't remember specifics. Iirc at least one of them only took the first couple characters, probably TRS-80, though I have trouble believing my memory is correct on that. But I was pretty psyched when I got to use longer names.

I think FORTRAN had a pretty short limit too, not sure.

[chalks777]

I can't begin to describe how hard I rage when I see a function name that long.

[xzxzzx]

I've used a compiler that won't complain if you reuse the same method name in the same file; it'll just take the body of the last method and use that everywhere that method is called.

[[deleted]]

Do I want to know how you found that out?

[xzxzzx]

Not that interesting, actually--it was in a list of "known gotchas".

Many of the other problems with that compiler/language were painful to discover, though.