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.earlyTo 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
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.
toto, titi, tata, tutu:
Standard series of metasyntactic variables among francophones.
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
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 mumble, for example. See also Commonwealth Hackish
for discussion of numerous metasyntactic variables found in Great
Britain and the Commonwealth.