Fred is also my favorite. This comes from my first job as a firmware developer many moons ago; I copied the practice of the somewhat curmudgeonly senior programmer on the team. He explained that Fred was an acronym for "F'in' Ridiculous Electronic Device."

Interesingly (?) this came up in the context of picking a good bit pattern for use as a signature for a data structure. "Fred" was exactly two bytes long and easy to spot in hex dumps. (He used a 4 for the r.)

laughingboy

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

For filenames I like single lower case characters. Tho I'll double them occasionally 'xx', 'zzz', etc.

For input strings I like 'qwer', 'asdf', 'zxcv' and the like.

A diabetic unix sysadmin friend liked 'donut', a former supervisor like 'zinj', a former (VMS guy) coworker liked 'blap'.

--
-ken rich       "I'm continually AMAZED at
                 th'breathtaking effects of
                 WIND EROSION!!"  (Zippy)
[download]

seriously - I do end my modules with "grep" (a hubristic habit I picked up from Ovid).

I'm not really a Seinfeld fan, but I tend to use $yada.

If I'm in a fairly amibivlent mood I use $blah.

I've tended to use musician's names, bands, etc:

sonny
terry
brownie
mcgee
miles
clapton
chick
elvis
khatchaturian
countbasie
dizzy
chubby
thelonious
rollins
aretha
petty
burdon
lennon
paul
simon
zombies

I like words that are not words, but that I can pronounce. I think I like non-words that end in 'arg' as well, though I'm wholly uncertain why. Maybe because those three letters are under the left hand. I've heard that many placeholder-type words are chosen for ease of typing like that (dreadpiratepeter's 'fred' fits the bill.)
Good placeholders, bad passwords.

Scary moment last week: In normal conversation, I truncated a sentence by replacing the last several words with 'foo' because I was too lazy to say what I meant. Luckily the person I was speaking to was also a programmer so no explanation was needed.

- kudra (why can't my speech have tab completion?)

The most commonly used dummy word in French must be 'toto'.

that can go "titi" "tata" "tutu" "toti" and so on .... That's how you recognize a french programmer ;]

May I suggest weaning yourself off the hard stuff by using the methadone of bad language?, words like:
• drat
• blast (just like Obi-Wan!)
• bother
• darn
I say, gosh, Great Scott, don't you know?

§ George Sherston

I use three main sets interchangeably.

@array1 = qw/foo goo moo loo hoo zoo/;
@array2 = qw/one two three four five/;
@array3 = qw/aye bee cee dee ee eff/;
[download]

I always use @array3 when I am populating a random hash, i.e.

</code>
$hash'A' = 'aye';
$hash'B' = 'bee';
</code>

and so on.

Regards,
Helgi Briem

Your 'blart' is very close to one I use when I'm frustrated... 'blarg!'. It must be a CB/irc thing.

()-()
 \"/
  `                                                     

Sometimes I also just use dialect words for things lying (on|around) my desk, when I just don't feel creative at all.

I quite like the idea to use other people's names. I only wonder whether you could tell from the way you use them, how much you like a person - I for one probably wouldn't use the name of a close person when I'm increasingly - how should I say? - ennervated.

--cs

There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls. - George Carlin

Anyway, I tend to end up using whatever comes to mind. 'blarg' (or 'blargh') has been a favorite lately, mostly because I've been reading 3 finger salute in my spare time, and my standard "I need two values here" words are 'monkey' and 'noodle'.

Preferably, when it's a type of data, say names, I always try to come up with the funniest-sounding thing, say "Hubert P. Hamsterlicker, Sr." or "Bertram German Wallaby". Needing dates, nonsensical values such as "99/74/-5" both fill space and provide values that can aid in data validation. Needing regular English text, I string together nonsensical but vaguely disturbing concepts, much like the word salad of a psychotic: "The English deputy authorized another vicious piranha, but undersea stock values were going down."

Sure, it takes a little time, but it's mildly entertaining.

-----------------------
You are what you think.

Oh, I'm a helpless 'blah' addict. Not just in my code either! Oh sure, there's always the need for stuff like this...

blah( $blah, \%blah );

...but I use it during testing and such as well. Don't try to convince me you've never pulled a './blah.pl > blah' before ;)! I can't help resorting to animals at times also, $monkey is a long-time favorite of mine.

The Fallen Monkey

open(A, "gump.txt);
@slurp = <A>;
chomp @slurp;
[download]

Makeshifts last the longest.

It was funny when I worked as a TA, to find all those words scattered around the code in the assignments ;)

–hsm

I have also found that it is useful to have your own vocabulary of nonsense words, so you can recognize your stuff. If I find die if ++$fwoing > 42, I know somebody cut & paste my code. It's also good when running across random files littering a file system. It helps to know whether you're supposed to recognize what something is. If it's named foo, anybody could have created it, but if it's gronk, I know exactly whose it is (I only know one friend who uses that one.)

but perhaps simplement because i dont speak english , i dont know

----
NaSe
:x

I myself generally stick to 'foo', 'bar', and sometimes 'baz', being a traditional type. But here in my country, many people use 'kuku', for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me.