cutting corners in STATUS ?

[Dave Touretzky at CMU-10A]

(status featurexxxxxxxx)   =>   (BIBOP BIGNUM ... etc. )

Hmmm.   STATUS seems to look only at the first five letters of a feature
name.  This seems like a truly non-Lispish thing to do.  One would expect
such of Pascal or some other heathen tounge, but Lisp should have more class.

Also, (STATUS STATUS) returns symbols that have obviously been
truncated after the 5th letter.  What gives?