Beefy Boxes and Bandwidth Generously Provided by pair Networks
Perl-Sensitive Sunglasses
 
PerlMonks  

Re: What's your favourite non-word?

by vladb (Vicar)
on May 27, 2002 at 22:06 UTC ( [id://169653]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to What's your favourite non-word?

Me thinks this is a largely cultural question. Throughout my personal experience as both an amature hacker and 'professional' programmer (a hacker who codes for a living :), the only most common word I have dealt with was -- *SURPRISE* *SURPRISE* -- 'foobar' or a few unimpressive variations of this.

I don't know if this is a problem with me (lacking that spirit of a rebel :), but I couldn't come up with any better alternative to a word that is on the one hand silly and purposeless, yet, on the other hand, very much useful in fitting voids for which my poor brain finds it hard to find any 'descriptive' alternative. Yes, I should admit that for the most part the word 'foobar' makes my day. I'd use it in virtually any script, database table, shell command, tutorial, documentation that I write. It is also pretty common in many books/articles on programming that I have read. On top of this, it seems as though my lack of imagination it has become an indispensible word for me. ;/? At one point, I did try to find an alternative word or a phrase in order to break the 'taboo' (yes, one might use the word to describe a 'thing' strongly imposed by the mainstream culture etc). Unfortunately, I couldn't get used to such things as 'test' or 'asdf', no matter how much I'd tried, heh ;)

_____________________
$"=q;grep;;$,=q"grep";for(`find . -name ".saves*~"`){s;$/;;;/(.*-(\d+) +-.*)$/; $_=["ps -e -o pid | "," $2 | "," -v "," "];`@$_`?{print"+ $1"}:{print" +- $1"}&&`rm $1`; print$\;}

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: What's your favourite non-word?
by kechari (Novice) on May 28, 2002 at 15:44 UTC

    For filenames I like single lower case characters. Tho I'll double them occasionally 'xx', 'zzz', etc.

    For input strings I like 'qwer', 'asdf', 'zxcv' and the like.

    A diabetic unix sysadmin friend liked 'donut', a former supervisor like 'zinj', a former (VMS guy) coworker liked 'blap'.

    -- -ken rich "I'm continually AMAZED at th'breathtaking effects of WIND EROSION!!" (Zippy)

Log In?
Username:
Password:

What's my password?
Create A New User
Domain Nodelet?
Node Status?
node history
Node Type: note [id://169653]
help
Chatterbox?
and the web crawler heard nothing...

How do I use this?Last hourOther CB clients
Other Users?
Others sharing their wisdom with the Monastery: (9)
As of 2024-03-28 12:24 GMT
Sections?
Information?
Find Nodes?
Leftovers?
    Voting Booth?

    No recent polls found