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> Seriously. "cdr"? "endp"? Was there a Great Keystroke Shortage in the '60s?

Well...yes? When jaw-dropping storage is a 1 MB hard disk, things like function names really do make a difference, especially when they're called so frequently. For the same reason, C89 identifiers are only 6 characters long (and hence the C naming convention of things like "strdup" rather than "duplicateString").

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Sure, because you can fit six characters in 32 bits. But still... those constraints are no longer with us, and there's a limited amount of historical cruft people learning a language today should have to deal with.

How do you fit 6 characters in 32 bits? What encoding / context? BTW, there was a Great Memory Shortage.

Something like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Radix-50

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