Well I think that for the length of var names, you could allow 31 characters, but when displaying them in reports or printouts requiring column formatting, you would truncate them adding ... to the fixed length.
So we would have:
IntLoopCountIndexWithAVeryLongName
printed
IntLoopCountIn...
It's the user choice to make variables names distinct at the beginning.
Hélio
For sure, memory is cheap these days, and I'm not dead set against
an extension to, say, 31 characters max, though I'd never use that
myself. The problem is how to handle the numerous printouts that
gretl does (model results, side-by-side printing of series, summary
statistics, correlation matrices, etc., etc.). Whenever I think
about this, the printing of results when allowing for very long
identifiers seems to me an intractable problem.
Allin