Of course they also had to limit the number of characters per symbol to 1 in order to unambiguously support the "ab" syntax for multiplying a and b (or however you wanted to overload the "absence of white space" operator), but fortunately they mitigated that little problem by making C++ fully supports Unicode, so you had thousands of single character Unicode variable names to choose from. His prophetic intuition was spot-on, now that there are so many expressive and inclusive Emoji characters to use for single character variable names!
https://www.stroustrup.com/whitespace98.pdf
I really appreciate Bjarne Stroustrup's clean simple design and coherent long term vision for C++2000, and I'm looking forward to using three dimensional white space overloading in C++3D.