[me2i81]

Six characters! Luxury. I worked on a system where we only had five.

[rwallace]

Five characters! Luxury. I learned to program on a system where we only had two. (Not joking: on the Commodore eight bit machines, only the first two characters of variable names were significant.)

[mark-r]

I learned to program on a BASIC system that had only one. Although strings were suffixed with $, so you could have both A and A$. Did I also mention that only upper case was available?

[cecilpl]

Applesoft BASIC (for the Apple ][e) was like this too.

[StillBored]

Yes, because both apple and commodore license microsoft basic as the core of their basic implementations.

[nocman]

Wow, I'd actually forgotten that.

I can still see that old VIC-20:

3583 BYTES FREE

READY.

[niklasni1]

In MUMPS, only the first two characters of function names are significant.