As I read it, Programming perl and others say:

"Thou shalt not name thy tokens as beginning and ending with double underscores, as thy script may break in any upcoming relase"

More or less. Your predecessor clearly chose to ignore such warnings. Rephrased: he just choose funny names for his functions.

Cheers,

Jeroen
"We are not alone"(FZ)
Update: BrotherAde pointed out the use of 'thy'....