Me thinks this is a largely cultural question. Throughout my personal experience as both an amature hacker and 'professional' programmer (a hacker who codes for a living :), the only most common word I have dealt with was -- *SURPRISE* *SURPRISE* -- 'foobar' or a few unimpressive variations of this.

I don't know if this is a problem with me (lacking that spirit of a rebel :), but I couldn't come up with any better alternative to a word that is on the one hand silly and purposeless, yet, on the other hand, very much useful in fitting voids for which my poor brain finds it hard to find any 'descriptive' alternative. Yes, I should admit that for the most part the word 'foobar' makes my day. I'd use it in virtually any script, database table, shell command, tutorial, documentation that I write. It is also pretty common in many books/articles on programming that I have read. On top of this, it seems as though my lack of imagination it has become an indispensible word for me. ;/? At one point, I did try to find an alternative word or a phrase in order to break the 'taboo' (yes, one might use the word to describe a 'thing' strongly imposed by the mainstream culture etc). Unfortunately, I couldn't get used to such things as 'test' or 'asdf', no matter how much I'd tried, heh ;)

_____________________ 
$"=q;grep;;$,=q"grep";for(`find . -name ".saves*~"`){s;$/;;;/(.*-(\d+)
+-.*)$/;
$_=["ps -e -o pid | "," $2 | "," -v "," "];`@$_`?{print"+ $1"}:{print"
+- $1"}&&`rm $1`;
print$\;}

[download]

In reply to Re: What's your favourite non-word? by vladb
in thread What's your favourite non-word? by George_Sherston

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.