system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
People who actually work in C, why are your variable names so short?

It's generally recommended to have variable names that are as expressive as possible, and it's not rare to see `longAssVariableNames` in languages like Java

But when I look at some C code (mostly remembering from my CS degree), variable names tend to be as short as possible

Why is that the case?
gpt
> Why is that the case?

Generally consistency internal to a codebase, coupled with habits that have been established over a long time. A lot of C code was written well before the advent of IDEs and in times where 80 columns was a hard maximum. 

So it's mostly "bad habits die hard".