Thank goodness it’s Friday.

This week I was creating a diagram and needed a few placeholder words. foo. bar. baz. The usual suspects. But I found myself needing a few more. I’ve used baq before as a 4th but wasn’t sure how ‘formal’ it was. Oddly enough, I can’t find a current reference to it! Egads. But I digress.

Wikipedia has a nice writeup of meta-syntactic variables and mashes some old-skool verbiage into a suggested “formal” list. Here is their list:

Wikipedia: A “standard list of metasyntactic variables used in syntax examples” is: foo, bar, baz, qux, quux, corge, grault, garply, waldo, fred, plugh, xyzzy, thud.

From a distance, this list looks pretty interesting. Though, ‘foo’ probably works better than ‘thud’ in a formal presentation. In my opinion, this list breaks down. Why? Because only ‘fred’ can be typed with one hand (QWERTY) and the words are too terse! I may be biased as a left-hander, but ‘fred’ is the only word that can be typed by either hand in isolation! Otherwise, they are either too obtuse for presentation or frustratingly difficult to smoothly type… regardless of their pristine historical roots. Seriously, try typing “xyzzy”. Ugh. Would you label a diagram element as ‘plugh’? Useless, perhaps. Room for improvement? Indeed!

Do you have any suggestions for what could be used after ‘baz’?

/happy naming/ – dave