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Comment by zertosh | Hacker News Reader

I'm the author. Since "a", "b", "c" get recycled by different scopes, it makes it really hard to figure out which "a" you're looking that. By having unique names, you can easily spot where one variable is used exclusively. I was going to use a dictionary but I didn't want the tool to be language specific or run into unsavory words.

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>> I didn't want the tool to be language specific or run into unsavory words

Good thoughts. However, "beedip" is foreign to everyone, whereas if you pick a language, it's at least native to some people.

Also, you could have maybe 50 known inoffensive words; there probably aren't more than that many unique variables in a scope. Things like "hat" and "bread".

Why don't you prefix variables based on their usage in the code?

function(a,b,c) -> function(arg1_cat, arg2_tree, arg3_carrot)

for(i=0; i< 10; i++) -> for(counter1=0; counter1 < 10; counter1++)

var a -> var global_pants;

You could do this reasonably well with regular expressions/find+replace.

To be more sophisticated you would use a a tokenizer/parser and rename based on the identifiers location in the AST nodes. I did something similar a few years ago for a commercial product that included a JavaScript beautifier and our customers loved it.

Or perhaps a consistent "namespace", e.g. with a standard prefix prepended to a simple noun.

You could use first names as your dictionary. The US Census Bureau has lists† (in the form of frequency tables) of male and female given names.

†http://www.census.gov/genealogy/www/data/1990surnames/names_...

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