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by rwallace 3942 days ago
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.)
4 comments

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?
Applesoft BASIC (for the Apple ][e) was like this too.
Yes, because both apple and commodore license microsoft basic as the core of their basic implementations.
Wow, I'd actually forgotten that.

I can still see that old VIC-20:

3583 BYTES FREE

READY.

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