Good for a chuckle and for a good point. Time Ottinger on the generally silly practice of reusing variables:

I suppose somebody forgot to clue me in to the Great Variable Shortage that is coming. I have seen people recycling variables to mean different things at different times in the program or different states of the containing object.

Next thing you know, we’ll here stories about how the old-timers had to carry their variables to work with them. “Up the call stack both ways!”