Sure.<p>If you have the variables TodayYYYY, TodayMM, and TodayDD in your program, then you cannot also have a variable named Today, because it's fully self-contained in another variable.  Why?  Because it screws up global find and/or replace in a simple text editor.<p>Lots of people have told me that this is unnecessary with a good IDE, and lots have given me lots of common examples of violations of this rule, but I still like the rule (guideline).  I like my source code to be portable, easily reviewed by even the simplest tools, and I like the common tasks (reviewing every instance of a variable in a program) to be easy.<p>One of the hardest things I ever have to do when reviewing someone else's code is to identify every use of a variable to find a bug or understand something.  Violation of this guideline is the biggest culprit.  (And violent, painful death to anyone who writes a 1200 line function wrapped with "for(a=b;a&#60;c;a++){...")<p>This is also why all variables must be 3 characters or more, or it would be very difficult to adhere to #12.<p>(FWIW, my list comes more from many iterations than from any theory or philosophy.  We can debate these forever.  I just like to do what works for me.  Use what you like, ignore the rest.)