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Welsh or C standard library function?
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this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2026
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I guess
strxfrmand the like date back to a period in the 80s when symbol names had to be kept short for the compiler/interpreter's sake. Like while BASIC back in those days technically allowed > 8 chr names, the interpreter only stored the first 8. In other words, the first 8 needed to be unique. As such, people tended to stick with <= 8 chr symbols to avoid interpreter issues. I think C allowed up to 31? But the culture of <= 8 prevailed nevertheless.Then in the 90s, such restrictions were largely dropped in most languages, and symbol names ballooned in size to take advantage of this new freedom. In C++, you even had reserved words growing to the likes of
reinterpret_castaround that time, but APIs just got ridiculous along the lineslengthy_class_name_followed_by_fully_spelled_out_method.Today, people seem to have come to their senses and settled on more reasonable lengths, though not to 80s extremes. Like going back to C++, we have new reserved words like
decltypeandconstexpr. In the 90s, these would likely have been spelled out in full likeconstant_expression?i still have a vague mistrust of file extensions longer than three characters.
like a glass walkway, i know .jpeg is just as safe as .jpg, but there's a hint of uneasiness.
I also have a vague mistrust of non-alphanumerics in file extensions. Like while .c++ is fine, .cpp feels…safer?
Well, yeah. Why would you tempt the shell to get garbled?
.cc and .hh feels the most serious.
But with great freedom comes great responsibility. I think Microsoft went from digestion noices to indirectly advertising their stake in arthritis medicine. I mean my fingers ache just looking at C# or PowerShell.
What was so wrong about puts or cout? I know it's not the most intricate functions, but going from a 4chr function to "Console.WriteLine()" is a symptom.
And as long as I'm already a riled up old fart, let me tell you about autocompletion. Why does MS have to autocomplete entire commands from ambiguous strings?
And the kids don't get it. They don't even write the code anymore, let alone understand it... I want coffee flavoured coffee, heavy metal and for dark mode to fucking die!
That felt better, I'm sorry for anybody making it this long.
Dude what's with ur crusade against dark mode lol. It's not like dark mode replaced light mode.
In some cases it did. I often come across dark theme only websites.
Waddaya mean crusade? Have you accidentally seen one of my other tirades?
Anyway:
It's not an argument for or against dark mode, but dark mode seems like that time, back in the 90s, when people insisted on using a blue background for word processing. We're just going in circles on this.
I sometimes do emacs over a terminal because ofc, but some of the font colors are hard to see in dark mode.
I was having legitimate eye strain issues before using dark mode in more places. I also only have vision in one eye, so that factor is in the mix. Anyhow, for me, dark mode is more of an accessibility tool, not "some hobbyist thing".
Dark mode to me harkens back to the days of terminals and mainframes. Light mode was popularized by the likes of Apple who believed in the wysiwyg philosophy. A document on screen should resemble its counterpart on paper.
But dark does seem to be in vogue once again. Something I did not see coming, much like how vinyl came back—which also tends to be a dark medium now that I think of it, though I can't think of any reason it really needs to be? Hmm…