Well, there's L1 norms, Lagrange point L1, an L1 visa, etc. In any of those contexts, it's an excellent variable name. There's also the case of short little ut

Well, there's L1 norms, Lagrange point L1, an L1 visa, etc. In any of those contexts, it's an excellent variable name. There's also the case of short little utilities. For something like strncmp (or at least my slightly naive version), I'd rather see code like int strncmp(const char* s1, const char* s2, int n) { for(; n>0; s1++, s2++, n--) { if (*s1 < *s2) { return -1; } else if (*s1 > *s2) { return 1; } } return 0; } than have code where someone attempted to come up with long "meaningful" names for each variable. There isn't really meaning here beyond "pointer_to_string1" and "pointer_to_string2", and longer names here do nothing but add visual clutter.