cweb

Well, this made me smile a little (nothing to do with names): https://github.com/wkoszek/cweb/blob/master/examples/oemacs.... Edit: Ok, I skimmed most of both files, and my initial impression seems to hold: there are short names, some are abbreviations, some are acronyms, but I didn't see (could have missed it) any "meaningless" name (ie. one that wouldn't have an expanded form of one or more words). But it's kind of beside the point with Knuth's work. Of course he uses short names: he just spent 3 pages of (carefully edited and typeset!) text to hammer its meaning into your mind. There's no way for you to misunderstand, or not understand, what the symbol signifies - so what does it matter what symbol it is, exactly? [EDIT2: it matters when typing] If you (anyone reading this, I mean) want to use these as an excuse for using meaningless a

Okay. Let's look at some Knuth! https://github.com/wkoszek/cweb/blob/master/cweave.w#L382 https://github.com/wkoszek/cweb/blob/master/examples/oemacs.... Now I don't see names signalling his intent. What I do see is that the code is arranged carefully into a narrative with the following property: code you want to read next is either immediately or before the code that uses it (or even just that piece of functionality). Little care seems to be given to what things are called directly -- almost the exact opposite of what you're suggesting.