What is foo

if one wished one's illustrative examples to be particularly verbose (or should I say pompous?), one might write:

void canonical_metasyntactic_function( void )
{
   int canonical_metasyntactic_variable;

   :
   // do stuff
   :
}

rather than

void foo( void )
{
   int bar;

   :
   // do stuff
   :
}

if one wished one's illustrative examples to be particularly verbose (or should I say pompous?), one might write:

void canonical_metasyntactic_function( void )
{
   int canonical_metasyntactic_variable;

   :
   // do stuff
   :
}

rather than

void foo( void )
{
   int bar;

   :
   // do stuff
   :
}

canonical_metasyntactic_'

I've looked at your example several times now and the first version is really growing on me as the names now have proper meaning.

beware of any "16 significant characters" limitations, though...

Oh, I just work around that by abbreviating it to "cm_var" and "cm_f". After all, everybody knows what really common abbreviations like these mean.

"beware of any "16 significant characters" limitations"

nah.
Why bother with cryptic unix names?

void supercalifragilisticexpialidocious(foobar)

is such a nice name for a function! Never settle for a toolchain with less than 255 chars for identifiers!