Other people's metasyntactic variables

Everyone knows about foo and bar. (or my $foo, int foo...) Probably because if you've the sort of mind described in the back of 'The new hacker's dictionary', you'll already have absorbed part of that culture without really knowing why. I had a similar-but-different experience while reading a weblog the other day. Salutory stuff.

Anyway. There are others - fred, bill, wibble, x, n.

If you come across integers or random indexes/counters that always seem to be i, j and k, you can tell that there's a dollop of ancestral FORTRAN somewhere in that code's gene pool.

I tend to use $thing and $otherthing. Actually, tended now that Perl has become an Orwellian un-language.

And of late I have been using 'blah' a lot. I had thought it had arrived randomly because it's quick to type like 'fred', but actually I now remember it was the favoured meta-variable of one of the hackers at Orchestream.

So there you go.