Where are the the comments in dmd?

[Walter Bright]

On 5/3/2021 7:25 AM, Dennis wrote:
> On Monday, 3 May 2021 at 13:17:29 UTC, Blatnik wrote:
>> Honestly another difficult thing to get is the file names themselves.
>>
>> `ty.d`, `ph2.d`, `mars.d`, `melf.d`, `fp.d`, `ee.d`, `e2ir.d`, `eh.d`, `el.d`, 
>> I could go on and on hahaha.
> 
> I think this stems from Walter Bright making C/C++ compilers since the 80s.
> In the MS DOS days the [8.3 
> filename](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8.3_filename) was the norm, so you could 
> not name `eh.c` `exceptionhandling.c` or `exception.c` even if you wanted to.

You're right about 8.3. I learned programming back when it was 6.3, and some old 
habits persist.

But also, when you're going to be typing those filenames tens of thousands of 
times, shorter is better :-)

Things always get optimized for the long term users, not newbies. For example, 
nobody says International Business Machines, they say IBM. San Francisco is 
Frisco. The United States is "the States". Oxycontin is Oxy. Elizabeth is Liz. 
The University of Washington is just "the dub" around here. It's not a problem.


> Of course your point still stands that dmd is not commented well and not easy 
> for new contributors get into, but a lot of the ugliness is there because of 
> historic reasons.

Parts of it date back to 1982, when C compilers were rather primitive.