Re (tilly) 2: Etymology of Foo, RFC 3092

[tilly]

Well fred and barney are two of the main characters from a popular kid's show The Flintstones. (And they were used in Learning Perl along with the rest of the cast.)

Perhaps, being French, you can give us more insight on why toto is a commonly used variable name there?

As for wombat, tutu, and titi, they are real things with a bit of the air of the ridiculous about them.

I have no clue about the others.

[arhuman]

I could indeed give some explanations but I fear they won't be as exhaustive as in the RFC 3092.

A LOT of french coders use toto (and its phonetic derivatives tata,tutu,titi).

'toto' has always been used as common name, in school
('toto is riding a bicyle a 10 mph, how long will it take to makes 25 miles ?')
or in common life where it's used in joke and examples.

It's part of our culture, just as I suppose you (english/american ?) use 'joe'.

The laziness factor is also inportant as 'toto' is even faster to type than 'azerty'(our 'qwerty') or '1234'.

"Only Bad Coders Badly Code In Perl" (OBC2IP)

[TheoPetersen]

wombat is variously attributed as an acronym for "Waste Of Money, Brains And Time."

As a Datatrieve survivor, I've also used wombat now and then as a name for any kind of data collection.