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Metasyntactic Variable
  • n. A name used in examples and understood to stand for whatever thing is under discussion, or any random member of a class of things under discussion. The word foo is the canonical example. To avoid confusion, hackers never (well, hardly ever) use `foo' or other words like it as permanent names for anything. In filenames, a common convention is that any filename beginning with a metasyntactic-variable name is a scratch file that may be deleted at any time. To some extent, the list of one's preferred metasyntactic variables is a cultural signature. They occur both in series (used for related groups of variables or objects) and as singletons. Here are a few common signatures foo, bar, baz, quux, quuux, quuuux. MIT/Stanford usage, now found everywhere (thanks largely to early versions of this lexicon!). At MIT (but not at Stanford), baz dropped out of use for a while in the 1970s and '80s. A common recent mutation of this sequence inserts qux before quux. bazola, ztesch Stanford (from mid-'70s on). foo, bar, thud, grunt This series was popular at CMU. Other CMU-associated variables include gorp. foo, bar, fum This series is reported to be common at XEROX PARC. fred, barney See the entry for fred. These tend to be Britishisms. corge, grault, flarp Popular at Rutgers University and among GOSMACS hackers. zxc, spqr, wombat Cambridge University (England). shme Berkeley, GeoWorks, Ingres. Pronounced /shme/ with a short /e/. foo, bar, zot Helsinki University of Technology, Finland. blarg, wibble New Zealand. toto, titi, tata, tutu France. pippo, pluto, paperino Italy. Pippo /pee'po/ and Paperino /pa-per-ee'-no/ are the Italian names for Goofy and Donald Duck. aap, noot, mies The Netherlands. These are the first words a child used to learn to spell on a Dutch spelling board. Of all these, only `foo' and `bar' are universal (and baz nearly so). The compounds foobar and `foobaz' also enjoy very wide currency. Some jargon terms are also used as metasyntactic names; barf and mumb