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Foo, Bar, Baz…: The Metasyntactic Variable and the Programming Language Hierarchy

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Abstract

This article argues that the English-language nonsense words “foo,” “bar,” “baz,” and others in a more or less standardized sequence of so-called metasyntactic variables commonly used in computer programming ought to be understood as meta-abstractive, re-representing a linguistically derived code’s abstraction of language and the abstraction of the programming language hierarchy itself, making it legible in a manner that rewards culturally oriented study: for example, of programming as a culture and of cultures of software development or engineering.

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Notes

  1. See Russell (2014), p. 168–169; Braman (2011), p. 296–298; Abbate (2000), p. 73–74.

  2. DEL stood for Decode-Encode Language, according to Crocker the first version of a host protocol language. See Reynolds and Postel (1987), p. 2.

  3. See Abbate (2000), p. 74 and Reynolds and Postel (1987), p. 3.

  4. See Reynolds and Postel (1987), p. 7.

  5. For the most recent version of The Jargon File, see Raymond (2004b).

  6. See, for example, “Mother of Five” (1937), The Tech (1938a), and The Tech (1938b) — all examples provided in Tim 2011.

  7. See, for example, Holman (1938).

  8. See Time (1945).

  9. On “snafu” and “fubar,” see Elkin (1946), Oxford Essential Dictionary of the US Military (2002), Burns and Novick (2007), Blackmore (2009), and Oxford English Dictionary Online, (2016).

  10. See Samson (1959).

  11. On the language metaphor in early computing, see Nofre et al. (2014). In practice, programming language specifications can vary widely, and in some cases a standardization document, reference document, or reference implementation serves in place of a specification. For examples representing the most widely used languages today, see Gosling et al. (2019), ISO/IEC 9899:2018 Information Technology, Programming Languages, C (2018), ISO/IEC 14882:2017 Programming Languages, C++ (2017), Standard ECMA-262: ECMAScript® 2019 Language Specification, 10th Edition (2019), and The Python Language Reference (2019).

  12. See, for example, Kernighan (1974), McConnell (1993), and Goodliffe (2007).

  13. The latter name reflects the complexity of graphical user interface (GUI) application components written in a programming language that strictly enforces an object-oriented programming style, such as Java. See, for example, Chartier (2004), Grouchnikov (2007), and Ynda-Hummel (2013).

  14. See, for example, Berkeley and Bobrow (1964), Hart and Levin (1964), and Samson (1966).

  15. See Sebesta (2010), p. 208, 211.

  16. See Sebesta (2010), p. 209-210.

  17. See Watson (2005), p. 142–152.

  18. See Wentworth and Flexner (1960), Wentworth and Flexner (1975), Chapman and Wentworth (1986), and Chapman et al. (1995).

  19. See Backus (1959). For Davis and Putnam’s use of “syntactic variable” see Davis and Putnam (1960). The phrase “metasyntactic classes” and “metasyntactic formulae” appear in ALGOL Bulletin (1961) and Knuth and Merner (1961), both in discussing the Algol 60 specification. For a catalog of other early examples of these and similar usages, see Bron (2017).

  20. See, for example, Hewitt et al. (1973), Nicholls (1975), and Galley and Pfister (1979).

  21. See Sachs (1976).

  22. See Sachs (1976).

  23. See Canvas, MediaWiki, Plone Documentation, Drupal API, Amazon Web Services, and GitHub Developer.

  24. See, for example, Knuth (1997).

  25. For another relevant discussion in this form, see Copeland (2010). For another example of a complaint, see Reisner (2012).

  26. See Kernighan (1974), McConnell (1993), and Goodliffe (2007), as cited previously.

  27. The classification of programming languages includes an imagined fourth and fifth generations; see Martin (1982).

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  1. Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Brian Lennon

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Lennon, B. Foo, Bar, Baz…: The Metasyntactic Variable and the Programming Language Hierarchy. Philos. Technol. 34, 13–32 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-019-00387-2

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