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If you program, what is the name(s) that you most often use for throwaway variables or filenames? I'm just curious, because I always used "banana". Not sure why. Maybe because it's just easy to type. But after reading a lot of programming blogs, I've come to the realization that a lot of people seem to use "banana". It even showed up as one of the top answers to the local jargon question on stackexchange. Wonder why. There's the perennial foo/bar/baz combo, of course. What's yours?

I use temp a lot. Not terribly creative.

"deleteme" is my favorite as I know I can safely get rid of it months down the road if I've forgotten what it was for in the first place.

When I was in my c++ class I used "fluffy_bunnies" for a lot of things.

Why? Because I could.

temp for variables, test for filenames.

x/y/z i/j/k for random variables, usually. I make every attempt to type as little as possible.

I use 'test', so it's obvious it's not meant to be used permanently.

For my test name (not a test label) I tend to use "Goober Menner," which was the name of my old Autoduel character.

For test/temp variables, I usually use words like 'blah' or 'blarg' or 'fleem'

--Patrick

Usually use "test" but as I get more and more frustrated with my code I start to use swear words. My hierarchy of frustration goes "crap" then "shit" then "fuck".

I am not at all a coder, I was hired as a graphics designer, but it's been my job recently to learn this online course software, so that I can teach it to our clients. So lately I've been having to learn a bit of PHP, MySQL, Apache and HTML, which has made my head hurt. I feel like I'm starting to understand HTML, but everything else, I'm just following instructions and using google everytime I run into unexpected errors (The program's manual was written for Linux, not a lot of care went into the instructions for a Windows installation)

To test the software, I created a course called Transformers 101.

My programming ability ended when Basic and 8bit machines disappeared!

I often used the name "randy5" in my programming classes but now I have no idea why.

Gusto said:

I often used the name "randy5" in my programming classes but now I have no idea why.

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Obviously it's because Johnny5 is entirely too common.

temp, test, deleteme

Test and temp are my go-to variables. I usually reserve x,y,z etc... for actual variables that don't have specific functions and are just to store a specific piece of data that may be used by other functions.

However, this is pretty much moot now that I've dropped computer science as my minor.

Well, that's too bad, Bowie. At least you'll still have that experience on your CV. Programming ability will be a big plus when grad schools are considering you.

stienman said:

Obviously it's because Johnny5 is entirely too common.

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Made my day.

MindDetective said:

Well, that's too bad, Bowie. At least you'll still have that experience on your CV. Programming ability will be a big plus when grad schools are considering you.

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Yeah, the way I look at it is that it will still look good on my CV to say that I'm proficient in Java and C++. When it started getting into machine language and logic gates, that's when it started getting over my head.

I'm also still occasionally programming as well, it's just that I was really more into the programming than the computer science side of things.

Ooo! I forgot to add this one. When I want to leave a mark that I want to be able to find later, I will drop this six-character sequence: ^^&&^^
This is left over from my old VAX/DCL days, where the text editor would insert that particular string as a marker to go back to later (i.e., the keyboard command "insert mark" would just drop "^^&&^^" wherever your cursor happened to be, and "find mark" would go to the next one of these).

--Patrick

PatrThom said:

Ooo! I forgot to add this one. When I want to leave a mark that I want to be able to find later, I will drop this six-character sequence: ^^&&^^
This is left over from my old VAX/DCL days, where the text editor would insert that particular string as a marker to go back to later (i.e., the keyboard command "insert mark" would just drop "^^&&^^" wherever your cursor happened to be, and "find mark" would go to the next one of these).

--Patrick

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I use FIXME and TODO in the comments occasionally to mark spots of code that need attention.