That isn't to say avoiding $a and $b is a bad thing... they are generally lousy variable names anyway. But I often use them in one-liners.
Me too. Also in golf/obfu when I want to keep the code strict safe (even if there would be other built in vars available and provided that it's easy to do so), like in this one.

In reply to Re^4: Split a string into items of constant length by blazar
in thread Split a string into items of constant length by Anonymous Monk

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