Standard C function names

Question

Is there any rationale for the abbreviated way standard C functions are written? For example, malloc() is short for 'memory allocation'. sprintf() is 'string print formatted'. Neither of these names are very good at telling you what the function actually does. It never occurred to me how terrible some of these abbreviated function names are until recently when I had to teach a new intern many of these functions.

When the language was being developed, was there any reason malloc() was chosen over memAllocate() or something similar? My best guess would be that they more closely resemble UNIX commands, but that doesn't feel like the right answer.

Answer 1

Check out http://publications.gbdirect.co.uk/c_book/chapter2/keywords_and_identifiers.html -

The problem is that there was never any guarantee that more than a certain number of characters would be checked when names were compared for equality—in Old C this was eight characters, in Standard C this has changed to 31.

Basically, in the past (long while back) you could only count on the the first eight characters for uniqueness in a function name. So, you end up with a bunch of short names for the core functions.

Answer 2

As Neal Stephenson wrote about Unix in In the Beginning Was the Command Line,

Note the obsessive use of abbreviations and avoidance of capital letters; this is a system invented by people to whom repetitive stress disorder is what black lung is to miners. Long names get worn down to three-letter nubbins, like stones smoothed by a river.

The first version of Unix and the first C compiler were written using versions of ed. Not vi, not emacs, not anything resembling an IDE, but the line-based ed. There comes a point where reducing the number of keystrokes really does increase the number of SLOC you can write per day, when you're inventing something brand-new and writing it for the first time.