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What kind of horribly constrained environment are you running on that you're worried about long variable names making your binaries too big.

Mea culpa, wasn't meant to be dumb though your observation is spot on. Consider it just literature, euphemistic - not ideal indeed - effort.

Obfuscators for Java and .NET often strip out a fair amount of binary size by renaming most things to a single char.

How big are you're .net dlls/exes? Most I see are less than 100KB, with the ones bigger than that containing a lor of resources (sql, icons, etc).