metasyntactic variable

A metasyntactic variable is something that stands for another piece of text.

To some extent, the list of one's preferred metasyntactic variables is a cultural signature.

A term often used for metavariable in that area is "metasyntactic variable".

It also sees occasional use as a metasyntactic variable by hackers.

Like Alice and Bob, it is an example of a metasyntactic variable when used this way.

For specifications written in natural language, nonsense words are commonly used as metasyntactic variables.

The term is also commonly used by hackers and programmers as a metasyntactic variable.

Any symbol or word which does not violate the syntactic rules of the language can be used as a metasyntactic variable.

That is, people who commonly use 'fred' as their first metasyntactic variable will often use 'barney' second.

The names are conventional, somewhat self-suggestive, sometimes humorous, and effectively act as metasyntactic variables.

For example, spam, ham, and eggs are the principal metasyntactic variables used in the Python programming language.

The origin of hoge as a metasyntactic variable is not known, but it is believed to date to the early 1980s.

"Argle" is also a somewhat common metasyntactic variable, the kind of placeholder names used by computer programmers.

Definition of metasyntactic variable, with examples.

Examples of metasyntactic variables used in Commonwealth Hackish, such as wombat.

'Two metasyntactic variables there.

Additional examples of the use of foo and bar in code are given in the entry on metasyntactic variables.

For example, you should use a metasyntactic variable in the documentation of a function to describe the arguments that are passed to that function.

In computing, the word is sometimes used as a metasyntactic variable or as a video game cheat code, the canonical "magic word".

In hacker culture, "metasyntactic variable" has come to denote some typical (otherwise meaningless) words used as metavariables in computing; see reification.

A metasyntactic variable is a variable in notation used to describe syntax, and meta-language is language used to describe language.

The origins of his nickname are a bit uncertain, but most likely have to do with switching the metasyntactic variable "bar" with "foo" in his last name.

By mathematical analogy, a metasyntactic variable is a word that is a variable for other words, just as in algebra letters are used as variables for numbers.

A metasyntactic variable is a placeholder name used in computer science, a word without meaning intended to be substituted by some objects pertaining to the context where it is used.

The IETF RFCs are rendered in plain text, making it necessary to distinguish metasyntactic variables by a naming convention, more or less obvious from context.