williams@nrl-css.arpa (10/15/87)
Since the discussion of f[oo|u]bar is turning into a discussion
of favorite "meta-syntactic variable names" (which is what these things
are called in the Hacker Dictionary) I thought I'd post the one I
occasionally use.
My introduction to Unix was in 1979, when I did a project at
the Computer Vision Lab of the University of Maryland. They had a
pdp-11/45 running version 6 Unix (and version 6 C!) connected to a
Grinnell frame buffer/display device. The interface procedures were
designed such that the user provided a memory buffer to an
initialization routine which wrote some stuff into the buffer. This
buffer was later passed to all other routines that accessed the
Grinnell. This memory buffer could have any name, of course, but in
most of the code I looked at it was "kumquat". This is because all of
the documentation examples had "kumquat" as the buffer. I have since
used kumquat as a nonsense identifer, much to the confusion of others
who read my code. Oddly, I NEVER use it as a macro name, a fact I
sometimes rely on. I recently turned over some code I wrote to the
people who will maintain it, and I forgot to remove the "ifdef'ed out"
sections:
#ifdef KUMQUAT /* Well *I* know that I never define this... */
/* broken code */
#endif
The next time I spoke to the person who went throught the code, that
was the first thing he asked about!
My friend Fred Blonder has commented that it is convenient that his login
name (fred) can be so easily typed, so I'm not surprised that it is a
popular nonsense word.
jim@mimsy.umd.edu | There is no 'd' in "kluge"!!
williams@nrl-css.arpa | It rhymes with "deluge", not "sludge".