It's hard for native speakers too. Numerical contractions aren't part of normal English (i.e they don't seem to exist outside of IT).

Numerical ones don’t seem to exist outside of IT, but other fields do the same strategy of abbreviating common long words by keeping only a letter or two. The non-numerical way is to just replace the rest with an “x” like “txn” for “transaction” in finance or “pax” for “passengers” in transportation or “sx” for “symptoms” in medicine.

Neat, that's one mystery solved. I have seen "x" used like that, but didn't know how it worked.

native speaker of assembly language?

I have dreamt in VAX assembly

Is it still okay to make "nothing sucks like a VAX" jokes?

(I kid, I think VMS has a better design than Linux)

> Is it still okay to make "nothing sucks like a VAX" jokes?

Please!

I was a stage II CS student learning assembly programming on a VAX simulator. Wrote a VAX simulator, in VAX assembly then ran VAX assembly programmes on it.

Was a lot of fun. The dreams were weird tho