Metasyntactic variables: do you use something else than "foo", "bar" according to your mother tongue

Question

In english, the variables foo and bar are very often used for simple examples, or for anonymous variables (see these three posts for more on these metasyntactic variables (1), (2), (3))

Usually, I often use titi, toto and huhu and it seems that I am not the only french guy to use them.

So, they should be different in german, spanish, chineese or whatever language...

And you, depending on your mother tongue, which variable names do you use (other than bar and foo, of course) in that case (I mean for anonymous variables, since we all know that we shouldn't use them in real program) ?

This should probably be community wiki. – You Aug 06 '09 at 20:56 — You, Aug 06 '09 at 20:56
How are "foo" and "bar" not programming-related? – John Saunders Aug 07 '09 at 13:56 — John Saunders, Aug 07 '09 at 13:56

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 12 '09 at 18:22

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"wibble" was popular in England.
Foo and Bar were always American, I never heard them until the web became widespread.

answered Aug 12 '09 at 18:22

Martin Beckett

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Michael Paulukonis · Accepted Answer · 2009-08-13T15:24:08.377

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"thingy" and "thangy" have been showing up in my code over the last six months. no idea how that started. mother-tongue = English.

[below added 24 hours after above]

Hunh. "thingy" shows up in Wictionary:Metasyntactic words (links to Wictionary:thingy) and briefly in Wikipedia:Metasyntactic_variable. And, of course, THIS page now shows up in the top-10 google hits for "metasyntactic thingy." (I'm just making it worse, aren't I?)

I use it most commonly as a throw-away buffer-name in Emacs

edited Aug 13 '09 at 15:24

answered Aug 12 '09 at 18:37

Michael Paulukonis

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thingy is used as a parameter in zeroclipboard: http://code.google.com/p/zeroclipboard/downloads/list -- "$: function(thingy) { " etc. – Michael Paulukonis May 06 '10 at 12:53

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 06 '09 at 21:01

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I think this can only apply to languages using Latin characters (since most programming languages use this character set).

I work in a development company based in Jordan (official language: Arabic), and we use Foo and Bar.

answered Aug 06 '09 at 21:01

Sinan Taifour

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most programming languages use Latin characters, but I suppose that programmers can then use a variable that "sounds" like another word/phonem in their original tongue, isn't it ? Of course, very often the english is used for the variables' name and the comments, but not always (specially with people that are not very confident with their english) – ThibThib Aug 06 '09 at 21:15

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 12 '09 at 18:30

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In addition to "foo" and "bar", I also use "blah", "variable", "testvar" and others.

answered Aug 12 '09 at 18:30

quanticle

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Metasyntactic variables: do you use something else than "foo", "bar" according to your mother tongue

4 Answers4