Even a chimp can write code

Wednesday, September 01, 2004

What's next after foo, bar?

We have all used metasyntactic variables in programming. Ever wonder what the sequence was and how it came about?

Well, the list of English values goes something like this:

foo, bar, baz, qux, quux, garply, waldo, fred, plugh, xyzzy, thud


The MIT-Stanford usage has been

foo, bar, baz, quux, quuux, quuuux ...

but in some cases qux has been inserted before quux

For a little bit of history, here's the entry for foo from ESR's Jargon File. Wikipedia provides an equally compelling discussion on metasyntactic variables in general. Go, enrich your geekspeak!

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