Besides which, "fs" is difficult for an English-as-a-second-language speaker to look up in the dictionary. I have the impression that some simply don't care about that because English is _their_ first language -- an unfortunate attitude.
Well. It's actually the opposite. Because English is (presumably) your first language, you prefer the non-abbreviated "filesystem" over "fs". From the perspective of someone who doesn't "think in English", the two have pretty much the same inherent value, i.e. they are arbitrary identifiers.
And to prove the point I didn't realize until following this thread that stdio was "standard i/o". I've always pronounced it "studio" and never stopped to think why the "u" was dropped and what it had to do with studios.
A mental mapping translates these identifiers into the entities they represent. Since the extra letters in the longer identifier do not add any semantic value to non-English speakers, they are merely clutter and do not contribute to readability.
Exactly. And if the longer name causes a line break then it has reduced readability. Darren