On Wed, 8 Sep 2004, jason corbett wrote:
As a newbie, I have seen the statement "foo(bar)" mentioned in books and and even on this site. I haven't yet seen what this actually mean as I can assume that its just for examples. If I am wrong please explain in detail what this is about.
Is your question about the names, or the syntax & construction?
The names "foo" and "bar" (and variants -- "baz", "bat", "foobar", etc) are common stubs that are often used in throwaway code, for demos and examples, for names to be filled in later, etc.
Just as algebra problems often use "x" and "n" for arbitrary variables, many Perl programmers use "foo" and "bar" for arbitrary variables.
As for the construct, `this( that )` is a subroutine / function call, where the language defined function or the programmer defined sub (or library module defined method) called "this" is being called with the parameter / argument "that". Or, in your example, "foo" and "bar" instead of "this" and "that".
Generally, if you see the phrase "foo(bar)", exactly like that, in documentation, then the writer is just making some kind of example, perhaps about what typical subroutine calls look like. (Note though that this example probably wouldn't actually work, because 'bar' here is a bareword, rather than a quoted string or a variable, so Perl might complain about passing it as an argument because it's not clear what should be done with bar; if it should be treated as a string, it should be wrapped in single- or double-quotes, and if it is a variable then it needs a prefix ($ @ % &). )
Make sense, or is something still unclear ?
-- Chris Devers
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