I didn't take much in the way of CS classes, either, so have your salt-shaker handy.

Presumably the code was written over time, perhaps by several people, and they got sloppy about the naming. Or they cut-and-pasted code from other programs that had the needed functionality, and didn't refactor it.

My understanding is that Best Practices generally say that you should have private routines that pass pointers or values back and forth, and not depend on magic names to move data around through the code. Most of the guts of the work should be done with private variables. (IOW, Globals Variables are Bad - http://c2.com/cgi/wi...alVariablesAreBad )

I can't see any benefit of taking a variable that holds user-entered data and renaming it to use elsewhere (unless it's an attempt to minimize Globals). Ultimately, the information gets pushed onto a CPU register - the transistors don't care what you call a variable.

HTH a little. Corrections welcome.

Cheers,
Scott.