That diotalevi was able to whip that patch up in 1/2 hour indicates that "obfuscation" by variable renaming is not useful at all. One could create a similar patch that renames those variables back. Eg I select a piece of code which contains an interesting algorithm (do you really think anyone would care to reverse engineer a whole software package?), and first replace the variables with var1...varN. Then, as I grasp the meaning, I replace the names one by one by something sensible. It's really not much effort. That is, if you have the time to do an easter-egg hunt for bugs/special features in other people's code.

By the way, why are you still staying anonymous? You are expressing strong opinions, which is perfectly alright, but it would be easier to take you more seriously if one could associate a name with the posts.

Also, in what way are you affiliated with stunnix.com?

Keep in mind my example is a bit too simple - it needs a way to exempt some symbols including those provided by perl, desired configuration variables anything exported by modules. It should be 100% safe to stomp all over pad variables - I'm a little leery of the globals because other things may attempt to do strange and untoward things which would be broken by renaming it out of the way. So its not perfect but its flaws are well known and can be corrected with a minimum of effort.

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