I worked with a young lady, fresh out of college, a few years ago who is a very sharp programmer. Apparently, foobar, fubar, etc, were used frequently in her class examples, to the point that she included them as variables in programs she wrote for the company. A senior programmer was helping her one day and noticed all of the foobar variables. He asked her if she knew what it meant and she truthfully had no idea. He explained it to her, she turned a few shades of red and quit using the variable. I honestly believe she had no idea what it meant. She also couldn't understand how us "grey beards" could abbreviate variables down to 8 characters. She had a hard time reading some of our programs. Ah, the innocence of youth. Steve
-----Original Message----- From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:linux-...@vm.marist.edu] On Behalf Of Michael MacIsaac Sent: Thursday, July 02, 2009 9:20 AM To: LINUX-390@VM.MARIST.EDU Subject: Re: OT (was Re: RHEL 5.4 Beta is out in the wild) Rob, > Maybe you could get a position at the ITSO as an editor and flag > the phrase "kill a daemon" I recently got a variable named "foo" edited out by an ITSO editor. Because everyone knows that foo is a variant of fubar which is an acronym with a *bad word* in it - "foo" might offend a reader. The compromise was to name the variable "goo". The next step may be to disallow all variables starting with "f", and who knows, maybe "s" too, for good measure :)) "Mike MacIsaac" <mike...@us.ibm.com> (845) 433-7061 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
