Coming up with "good" variable names meaning: descriptive, understandable and "short" names is an art form. Practice matters. Your response reminded me of one the best ASM drivers I've ever read (from 30+ years ago). In those days limit was 5 letters, all CAPS for a var name. That was it! "ABCDE". I read this guy's code and I understood it. There were 2 comments in the ASM code: 1)"Suck it in" and 2) "blow it out". This guy was at a level that extremely few will ever achieve in terms of clarity, efficiency, brevity.

I think we should ALL strive for descriptive names. I did some simple "translation" above.

The underscore thing is a name space thing. I will defer to other Monks on the wisdom of that in OO modules. This is basically Perl OO thing that means that this is a private function that I my convention will not export and you should not call and thing with a name like that.