Comment by projektfu

It sounds a lot like a FoxPro codebase I worked with. Mumps predates FoxPro by 15-20 years but some constraints applied to FoxPro that are silly now, especially 8 character DOS filenames. Both languages let you build a string that you then use as a function name and have a form of "eval". In both cases, namespaces are absent and made up for by code letters and lookup tables. In FoxPro 2.x, tables were named by their filenames. Code was shared between projects by using a 2 letter code to different the parts that were project specific. It was WTF-inducing for me at the time, coming from C++ and Pascal, but it made sense at the time. Those applications were quite fast on very limited hardware, probably 286s when the project was started.