Thanks for all the comments. My original "problem" was fairly trivial, just hoping for a way making code a little more intelligible. So in the end I think the simplest way is just to have dummy valiables declared at the top of the implementation, and used in calls where the actual variable value is not relevant. That way I at least do not have extraneous variable declaration within the main code, and it doesn't involve anything clever in the way of coding.