>>>>> "Wiggins" == Wiggins d Anconia <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Wiggins> Not just Perl programmers: Wiggins> http://jargon.watson-net.com/jargon.asp?w=metasyntactic%20variable Wiggins> http://jargon.watson-net.com/jargon.asp?w=foo It's because of the overuse of Foo and Bar that I chose Fred and Barney in the first edition of Learning Perl. I had originally put Foo and Bar in many examples, but was watching some cable network like WTBS (this was before Cartoon Network) in the background and kept hearing Fred and Barney in place of Foo and Bar. So, I did a global substitute of Fred for Foo, and Barney for Bar, and then cleaned up the text. Once that gelled out, I started using the rest of the Flintstones as a theme for the examples that had not been written. And that's how it got started. When Perl5 came along, the tradition continued into the manpages, using Flintstones, Jetsons, and Simpsons. And when Stonehenge instructors wrote the other materials, we picked different themes, like the Gilligan's Island references for the Alpaca (Learning Perl volume 2). So, there you have it. Foo/Bar => Fred/Barney, and the rest is history. Eric Raymond once asked if I had invented this mapping, or if I had copied it from some British documentation he had seen. But my response (roughly the above) has not yet made it into ESR's Hackers Dictionary. -- Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/> Perl/Unix/security consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc. See PerlTraining.Stonehenge.com for onsite and open-enrollment Perl training! -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>
