The Early Days of Disemvoweling

The Early Days of Disemvoweling

I mentioned "disemvoweling" recently; a reader points to some examples of such from the early days of PC development:

Even though Bud Tribble had to leave the Mac team in December 1981 in order to retain his standing in the M.D./Ph.D. program at the University of Washington, he decided that he could still do the initial implementation of the memory manager, as we were planning all along, hoping to finish it quickly after he moved back to Seattle, before classes started. He obtained a copy of the memory manager source from Tom Malloy, but he was in for a shock when he began to read the code.

The memory manager source lacked comments, which was disappointing, but the biggest obstacle was the names selected for variables and procedures: all the vowels were gone! Every identifier seemed to be an unpronounceable jumble of consonants, making it much harder to understand the code, since a variable's meaning was far from obvious. We wondered why the code was written in such an odd fashion. What happened to all of the vowels?

It turns out that Tom Malloy was greatly influenced by his mentor at Xerox, a strong-willed, eccentric programmer named Charles Simonyi. Charles was quite a character, holding many strong opinions about the best way to create software, developing and advocating a number of distinctive coding techniques, which Tom brought to the Lisa team. One of the most controversial techniques was a particular method of naming the identifiers used by a program, mandating that the beginning of each variable name be determined by the type of the variable.

However, most of the compilers in the early eighties restricted the length of variable names, usually to only 8 characters. Since the beginning of each name had to include the type, there weren't enough characters left over to use a meaningful name describing the purpose of the variable. But Charles had a sort of work-around, which was to leave out all of the vowels out of the name.

The lack of vowels made programs look like they were written in some inscrutable foreign language. Since Charles Simonyi was born and raised in Hungary (defecting to the west at age 17), his coding style came to be known as "Hungarian". Tom Malloy's memory manager was an outstanding specimen of Hungarian Pascal code, with the identifiers looking like they were chosen by Superman's enemy from the 5th dimension, Mr. Mxyzptlk.