Sorry, missed the other question in your post. 2x3was probably just a local name for the standard.

Back when Chad an 8-character limitation on identifiers, the use of TLAs was common (TLA = Three-Letter Abbreviation). There were also odd occasions when it still made sense under the conventions of the day to have non-array repetitions (very rare, but greater than zero occurances).

So the standard just sort of naturally developed out of the other coding standards in play at the time, where function/instance combinations just sort of rolled off our fingers. Variables started taking on forms like:

	inpfnm		Input filename
	outfnm		Output filename
	INPFIL		Input file handle (technically a stream pointer in C)
	OUTFIL		Output file handle
	genpos01		General Position 1
	genpos02		General Position 2

It was an ugly standard, seen from today's descriptive tendencies, but for old mainframe hacks and formatting pedants such as myself, it seemed a thing of beauty and joy; concise, predictable, and sensible.

It was a marked improvement to the other mainframe tendency of the day to simply remove the vowels, yielding unwieldy names that begged for typos and were of inconsistent length in the source code ( MRCHNT_VNDR_ID -- yuck!)

Like I said in another post, I try to be kind to normal people when others have to read my code; but if I expect to be the only user, all my blocks line up nicely, and I quietly revel in my control-freak haven of bliss.