Other people's metasyntactic variables

[hirez]

Everyone knows about foo and bar. (or my $foo, int foo...) Probably because if you've the sort of mind described in the back of 'The new hacker's dictionary', you'll already have absorbed part of that culture without really knowing why. I had a similar-but-different experience while reading a weblog the other day. Salutory stuff

Comments

[hirez]

Once an assembly hacker...

[nalsa]

$boo & $far (but also much i &j). but $C0FF33 makes the occasional appearance. (c0:ff:33: is my default mac prefix when populating tables, too).

[perlmonger]

Dangling cultural signifiers...

Apart from foo/bar/baz, I tend to xyzzy (for obvious reasons) and crapp0 (a personal hangover; a cow-orker 30-odd years ago always so referred to that ancient stats package CRP0).

[steer]

Are the obvious reasons because you like vector arithmetic or because you like old school text adventure games?

[perlmonger]

The latter, but both really I suppose :)

[nojay]

84,362 is my standard large number as in "It took me eighty-four thousand three hundred and sixty-two attempts to get this to work." I don't know where it came from but it's reflexive now.

[mr_tom]

m'Aberdonian colleague tends to $jobbies, whereas I'm more of a $cordwangle, $loominthrumbs, $splod type.