The "proper name" for the series: foo, bar, etc

[usenet]

Nathan Torkington (whose name should be familiar to those who own a
copy of The Perl Cookbook) was MC for the OSCON keynote addresses
yesterday morning. In one of his comments (as an aside, really), he
mentioned the familiar "throwaway" variable series foo, bar, etc, but
he identified this series by a name that I was not familiar with (and
he suggested there was a "proper" order for the series - I usually see
"baz" as the third term, but Nate said something else).

I can't remember the term he used (and I'm not even sure I heard it
correctly). Does someone know the name of this series? I'm curious...

 

[Ben Morrow]

Quoth (e-mail address removed):

Nathan Torkington (whose name should be familiar to those who own a
copy of The Perl Cookbook) was MC for the OSCON keynote addresses
yesterday morning. In one of his comments (as an aside, really), he
mentioned the familiar "throwaway" variable series foo, bar, etc, but
he identified this series by a name that I was not familiar with (and
he suggested there was a "proper" order for the series - I usually see
"baz" as the third term, but Nate said something else).

I can't remember the term he used (and I'm not even sure I heard it
correctly). Does someone know the name of this series? I'm curious...

They're generally called 'metasyntactic variables': see
http://catb.org/jargon/html/F/foo.html .

Ben

 

[Xicheng Jia]

Nathan Torkington (whose name should be familiar to those who own a
copy of The Perl Cookbook) was MC for the OSCON keynote addresses
yesterday morning. In one of his comments (as an aside, really), he
mentioned the familiar "throwaway" variable series foo, bar, etc, but
he identified this series by a name that I was not familiar with (and
he suggested there was a "proper" order for the series - I usually see
"baz" as the third term, but Nate said something else).

I can't remember the term he used (and I'm not even sure I heard it
correctly). Does someone know the name of this series? I'm curious...

check this out:

http://www.answers.com/topic/metasyntactic-variable

Xicheng

 

[usenet]

check this out:

http://www.answers.com/topic/metasyntactic-variable

Yes, that is it, thanks (and thanks also, Michele). The term that
Nathan used was, indeed, "metasyntactic variable." Apparently (if I
understood correctly) our good Mr. Torkington also subscribes to the
MIT variation of the series which drops "baz" (making the third term
"quux" which I don't think I've ever seen before).

 

[anno4000]

[foo, bar, baz]

I can't remember the term he used (and I'm not even sure I heard it
correctly). Does someone know the name of this series? I'm curious...

Ask Gaspode -- the mongrel of Discworld fame. It's one of favorite
words.

Anno

 

[morrison]

I can't remember the term he used (and I'm not even sure I heard it
correctly). Does someone know the name of this series? I'm curious...

http://search.cpan.org/dist/Acme-MetaSyntactic