Mail Archives: djgpp/1997/08/12/18:19:07
Georg Kolling <Georg DOT Kolling AT t-online DOT de> wrote in article
<m0wwaCI-0003IPC AT fwd05 DOT btx DOT dtag DOT de>...
> Bill Currie schrieb:
> > struct foo {
> > char snafu __attribute__((packed));
> > long bar __attribute__((packed));
>
> Is there anywhere a factory that produces such strange var names?
> Or are they all hand-made? Somewhere I read 'booga', but my favourite
ones are
> 'double half' and 'long ago' although they are 'real' names...
'foo' and 'bar' are "standard" metasyntactic variables.
For those unacquainted with metasyntactic variables, here's a snippet from
the Jargon File 4.0.0 (http://www.ccil.org/jargon/jargon.html):
metasyntactic variable /n./
A name used in examples and understood to stand for whatever thing is under
discussion, or any random member of a class of things under discussion. The
word foo is the canonical example. To avoid confusion, hackers never (well,
hardly ever) use `foo' or other words like it as permanent names for
anything. In filenames, a common convention is that any filename beginning
with a metasyntactic-variable name is a scratch file that may be deleted at
any time.
To some extent, the list of one's preferred metasyntactic variables is a
cultural signature. They occur both in series (used for related groups of
variables or objects) and as singletons. Here are a few common signatures:
foo, bar, baz, quux, quuux, quuuux...:
MIT/Stanford usage, now found everywhere (thanks largely to early versions
of this lexicon!). At MIT (but not at Stanford), baz dropped out of use for
a while in the 1970s and '80s. A common recent mutation of this sequence
inserts qux before quux.
bazola, ztesch:
Stanford (from mid-'70s on).
foo, bar, thud, grunt:
This series was popular at CMU. Other CMU-associated variables include
gorp.
foo, bar, fum:
This series is reported to be common at XEROX PARC.
fred, barney:
See the entry for fred. These tend to be Britishisms.
corge, grault, flarp:
Popular at Rutgers University and among GOSMACS hackers.
zxc, spqr, wombat:
Cambridge University (England).
shme
Berkeley, GeoWorks, Ingres. Pronounced /shme/ with a short /e/.
snork
Brown University, early 1970s.
foo, bar, zot
Helsinki University of Technology, Finland.
blarg, wibble
New Zealand.
toto, titi, tata, tutu
France.
pippo, pluto, paperino
Italy. Pippo /pee'po/ and Paperino /pa-per-ee'-no/ are the Italian names
for Goofy and Donald Duck.
aap, noot, mies
The Netherlands. These are the first words a child used to learn to spell
on a Dutch spelling board.
Of all these, only `foo' and `bar' are universal (and baz nearly so). The
compounds foobar and `foobaz' also enjoy very wide currency.
Some jargon terms are also used as metasyntactic names; barf and mumble,
for example. See also Commonwealth Hackish for discussion of numerous
metasyntactic variables found in Great Britain and the Commonwealth.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chris La Mantia / lamantia AT gte DOT net
Current Project: Infinite Worlds, an RPG with a dynamic world
http://home1.gte.net/lamantia/infinite
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