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From: "Mark Lundquist" <mlundquist2@attbi.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
References: <3C0DB9D0.7184868A@acm.org>
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"Ted Dennison" <dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message
news:KE6Q7.52969$xS6.87397@www.newsranger.com...
> In article <nLPP7.4018$Yy.271026@rwcrnsc53>, Mark Lundquist says...
> >        procedure Make_Empty (List : Lists.List);
> >
> >(although, that's a parameter that I would probably name "This")...
>
> That's not *too* bad. After all, what you really want to say is that this
is the
> thing that is being made empty.

Right.  "This" can take on a faint whiff of lameness (though not approaching
the pungency of "The_Foo"), and when it does that means I've lapsed into
defaulting to it without putting enough effort into coming up with names.  A
fair amount of the time, though, it really does work out that "This" is the
best name (following the "favor named association" approach).

> Here I'd be apt to use something like "Target"
> or "Subject" (or in a wierd mood, "Victim").

Hah, I use "Victim" too :-)... usually very locally, like in a declare
block, for something that is about to be deallocated.

> Those look better on the inside
> than *this*. Yes, the outside code is more important, but someone has to
> maintain the stuff on the inside of the routine too.
>

Good point.  If it helps, one can use a renaming declaration in the body to
give more reasonable "inside" names to the parameters.

> >The imagination recoils... :-)  ("Right then... next name please!")
>
> But it'd make a smashing Monty Python skit. :-)
>

My thought exactly :-).  Nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more, say no more...

-- mark