Now that I think of it, I certainly have tripped on "list" arguments in Python, but adopted haskellers' "xs" for such generic uses and forgot about it. BTW, GHC

Now that I think of it, I certainly have tripped on "list" arguments in Python, but adopted haskellers' "xs" for such generic uses and forgot about it. BTW, GHC throws especially funny messages when you define a variable like "head" or "last" and then try to call the shadowed function. OTOH, Emacs' python-mode highlights builtins regardless of context, very convenient to catch such lapses immediately.