The canonical example is how it's done in Forth: Ask for a number and it's already on the stack. Ask for three numbers and you push onto the stack three times.

The canonical example is how it's done in Forth: Ask for a number and it's already on the stack. Ask for three numbers and you push onto the stack three times. Upside: Terse code. Downside: Stack juggling can be a big maintenance burden. FWIW I've realized that in languages that are variable centric, an anonymous naming convention is often preferable to a human name because it centers one's concerns around the algorithm. After studying the options for a while I now flip between descriptive word style and "single letter and number." So I have a lot of "x0, x1, i0, s0, a0" in my function arguments. Where it's a record type, I'm deciding between abbreviation and descriptive - which ultimately depends on how often and densely I expect the data structure to be accessed(short names imply it gets used in a dense, idiomatic style).