foo bar baz; alice bob mallory; aphla ateb

April 15, 2006 8:55 AM

foo bar baz [1, 2]; alice bob mallory [3]; aphla ateb [4]

any others? was frege the first to use aphla and ateb? any other examples like aphla where the "ph" keeps its order when the word is reversed?

kind-of-related (easier but less interesting): the king of france; morning and evening star(s). these are ideas/examples that recur in (english/american - analytic) philosophy. others? equivalents from other fields?

posted by andrew cooke to Grab Bag (13 answers total)

Response by poster: oh, and so does aphla ateb also work in german?
posted by andrew cooke at 9:32 AM on April 15, 2006

D-Day is an interesting reversal of this, andrew. D was originally a place holder used to signify the day of any particular invasion, just as H-Hour stands for the time. The invasion of June 6th, 1944 changed all that, becoming so famous that D lost significance as a place holder. Most people now think there was only one D-Day, and D is an abbreviation.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 9:41 AM on April 15, 2006

Wikipedia has more metasyntactic variables.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 9:46 AM on April 15, 2006

Response by poster: oh, duh. i should so have checked that first.... thanks.
posted by andrew cooke at 9:50 AM on April 15, 2006

Interesting, I almost never see baz in use anymore. I thought it had wandered off into the annals of computing history.
posted by tkolar at 10:01 AM on April 15, 2006

Don't forget the Jargon File...

I use foo/bar/baz/bof/boof, but I don't usually need more than foo/bar/baz ... if I get to boof, my programming usually has gone boof.
posted by SpecialK at 10:14 AM on April 15, 2006

Andrew, are you working on a FPP? Is it time for foo to be exposed to the fooless?
posted by furtive at 11:57 AM on April 15, 2006

Response by poster: heh, no fpp (though i did think as i wrote the question that it was a bit like a mefi post). feel free if you want (although i vaguely remembr hearing that more people read this place than mefi...)
posted by andrew cooke at 12:13 PM on April 15, 2006

I've never seen "bof" or "boof". I like them.

Perl people tend to go to "quux" when they get past "baz" in my experience.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 3:01 PM on April 15, 2006

I sometimes use Bob, Carol, Ted and Alice from the movie of the same name but I don't know if I caught that from someone else or came up with it myself.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 3:08 PM on April 15, 2006

I can never remember what to use after I go through "foo", "bar" and "baz". Usually, I end up using "blah", but as SpecialK noted, if I've gotten to "blah" I probably need to write some Real Code That Works or simplify what I have.
posted by jmhodges at 3:22 PM on April 15, 2006

Quux pre-dates perl by years, possibly decades.
posted by QIbHom at 8:33 PM on April 15, 2006

Quux pre-dates perl by years, possibly decades.

Never said it didn't. I don't know what your point is.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 9:36 PM on April 15, 2006