Why do programming shops in the gambling industry have such weird coding rules and standards?

Yes, I’m a computer programmer by day. Most programming is temp/consulting work these days. A few years ago, I did a consulting stint for a casino in Lost Wages. I can understand having to pass through half-dozen card-keyed doors and security checkpoints to get to my desk, but they also had such weird coding rules and standards. They didn’t allow comments in the programs (really!). Field names had to be short and cryptic. There couldn’t be any kind of similarity between related variable names in the programs and the files. I’d try to make my function names and variable names descriptive to make up for the lack of comments. When I’d submit a program for review, very often the supervisors would change things around to make the program LESS readable (yet, they’d say they were changing it to improve readability). Simple logic constructs would be reworked to make them unnecessarily complex and less intuitive. Is this insanity normal for programming in the gambling industry? Why?