It always bugs me when I see numbers used to represent things that aren't numeric. For example, consider a finite state machine for an FTP client. It might use a number to represent the state of a machine where 0 means disconnected, 1 means connected and 2 means transferring. You should always strive to give meaningful names to the states rather than just using numbers. In C, developers used #defines to do this. In other languages you could use enumerated types or symbols. Whatever you choose, don't just use numbers to represent non-numeric things. Understandability of code is important and assigning a name rather than a number helps you understand the code.
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