Actually, this is kind of funny as I've been using this approach for a couple of years and not thought to much of it so as to comment to the world ... Since my background is in software development - namely c, c++, Ruby, Lisp and other syntactically succinct languages, I felt driven to look for a way to get around the clunky syntax of the cursor declaration, as well as the issue that the reference variable appears differently in code than a standard variable in that the @ is not present and the parser uses this "syntactical difference" as a class differentiator. While there is a little more code, it is also more "readable" and therefore leans toward meeting goals of self-documentation.

The "next one" in line with this (and I have not looked to see if there are any postings to this effect already), is using this technique for dynamic iteration of tables using sys information – which has a few different caveats. If there is any desire for this, let me know and I can post example code and ancillary discussion. One benefit to this is constructing queries on the fly where you do not want to have to hard code in order to get the efficiency of using the column names (as opposed to using the * operator, which causes performance degradation in testing).  This enables you to create “template” procedures more readily. There are other advantages as well.