> I can have very different words for a character (char, "", etc.) but in my head they take exactly the same amount of space.
how sure are you? given how little we know about the brain, i'd be cautious with asserting something like that as a fact. while i don't think we store bytes in our head, i'm not certain that the length of a "symbol" doesn't matter either.
Maybe different people do it differently, after all some have photographic memory, I don't. But I certainly don't think about all the letters involved in a variable but rather the concept of the variable, or what that variable represents. Doesn't matter if it's called "numberOfBurgersPerCustomer" or "nb" as such. But in case I forget, "numberOfBurgersPerCustomer" immediately tells me what is going on compared to just "nb".
I guess the point is that I don't want to wade in definitions just to get the gist of a code. I want to jump in there, see immediately what's going on and where the problem can be.
how sure are you? given how little we know about the brain, i'd be cautious with asserting something like that as a fact. while i don't think we store bytes in our head, i'm not certain that the length of a "symbol" doesn't matter either.