I guess what he&#x27;s getting at here is that these variable names don&#x27;t convey what the variable holds.<p>Let&#x27;s say you&#x27;re writing C and you want to return status information from processes as integers. Instead of:<p>&gt; return retVal;<p>where retVal could be 0, -1 or -2 to indicate success or failure of the function, how about:<p>&gt; return functionStatusCode;<p>? Or be even more specific (let&#x27;s say the function tried to parse some text) with parserStatusCode.<p>All of those are more helpful than retval, because they give you some sort of idea as to what you&#x27;re returning. You&#x27;r enot returning how many values were parsed, or some sort of information about what you parsed, you&#x27;re returning the status of the parsing function.<p>The meaning of those values is probably a little harder to encode in the variable names (especially if there are many such values), but that&#x27;s what the comments are for.