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Metasyntactic Variable
A metasyntactic variable is a specific word or set of words identified as a placeholder in computer science and specifically computer programming. These words are commonly found in source code and are intended to be modified or substituted before real-world usage. The words foo and bar are good examples as they are used in over 330 Internet Engineering Task Force Requests for Comments, the documents which define foundational internet technologies like HTTP (web), TCP/IP, and email protocols. 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. Metasyntactic variables are used to name entities such as variables, functions, and commands whose exact identity is unimportant and serve only to demonstrate a concept, which is useful for teaching programming. Common metasyntactic variables Due to English being the foundation-language, or lingua franca, of most computer programming l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Placeholder Name
Placeholder names are words that can refer to things or people whose names do not exist, are temporarily forgotten, are not relevant to the salient point at hand, are to avoid stigmatization, are unknowable/unpredictable in the context in which they are being discussed, or are otherwise de-emphasized whenever the speaker or writer is unable to, or chooses not to, specify precisely. Placeholder names for people are often terms referring to an average person or a predicted persona of a typical user. Linguistic role These placeholders typically function grammatically as nouns and can be used for people (e.g. '' John Doe, Jane Doe''), objects (e.g. '' widget''), locations ("Main Street"), or places (e.g. ''Anytown, USA''). They share a property with pronouns, because their referents must be supplied by context; but, unlike a pronoun, they may be used with no referent—the important part of the communication is not the thing nominally referred to by the placeholder, but ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Foobar
The terms foobar (), foo, bar, baz, and others are used as metasyntactic variables and placeholder names in computer programming or computer-related documentation. - Etymology of "Foo" They have been used to name entities such as variables, functions, and commands whose exact identity is unimportant and serve only to demonstrate a concept. History and etymology It is possible that ''foobar'' is a playful allusion to the World War II-era military slang FUBAR (''Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition)''. According to an Internet Engineering Task Force RFC, the word FOO originated as a nonsense word with its earliest documented use in the 1930s comic ''Smokey Stover'' by Bill Holman. Holman states that he used the word due to having seen it on the bottom of a jade Chinese figurine in San Francisco Chinatown, purportedly signifying "good luck". If true, this is presumably related to the Chinese word '' fu'' ("", sometimes transliterated ''foo'', as in '' foo dog''), which can m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Python Programming Language
Python is a high-level, general-purpose programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability with the use of significant indentation. Python is dynamically-typed and garbage-collected. It supports multiple programming paradigms, including structured (particularly procedural), object-oriented and functional programming. It is often described as a "batteries included" language due to its comprehensive standard library. Guido van Rossum began working on Python in the late 1980s as a successor to the ABC programming language and first released it in 1991 as Python 0.9.0. Python 2.0 was released in 2000 and introduced new features such as list comprehensions, cycle-detecting garbage collection, reference counting, and Unicode support. Python 3.0, released in 2008, was a major revision that is not completely backward-compatible with earlier versions. Python 2 was discontinued with version 2.7.18 in 2020. Python consistently ran ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Egg (food)
Humans and human ancestors have scavenged and eaten animal eggs for millions of years. Humans in Southeast Asia had domesticated chickens and harvested their eggs for food by 1,500 BCE. The most widely consumed eggs are those of fowl, especially chickens. Eggs of other birds, including ostriches and other ratites, are eaten regularly but much less commonly than those of chickens. People may also eat the eggs of reptiles, amphibians, and fish. Fish eggs consumed as food are known as roe or caviar. Bird and reptile eggs consist of a protective eggshell, albumen ( egg white), and vitellus ( egg yolk), contained within various thin membranes. Egg yolks and whole eggs store significant amounts of protein and choline, and are widely used in cookery. Due to their protein content, the United States Department of Agriculture formerly categorized eggs as ''Meats'' within the Food Guide Pyramid (now MyPlate). Despite the nutritional value of eggs, there are some potential healt ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spam (food)
Spam (stylized as SPAM) is a brand of canned cooked pork made by Hormel Foods Corporation. It was introduced by Hormel in 1937 and gained popularity worldwide after its use during World War II. By 2003, Spam was sold in 41 countries on six continents and trademarked in over 100 countries. Spam's basic ingredients are primarily pork shoulder and ham, with salt, water, modified potato starch (as a binder), sugar, and sodium nitrite (as a preservative). Natural gelatin is formed during cooking in its tins on the production line. Concerns about Spam's nutritional attributes have been raised, in large part due to its high content of fat, sodium, and preservatives. Spam has affected popular culture, including a Monty Python skit, which repeated the name many times, leading to its name being borrowed to describe unsolicited electronic messages, especially email. It is occasionally celebrated in festivals such as Austin's Spamarama. History Hormel introduced Spam on July 5, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Function Overloading
In some programming languages, function overloading or method overloading is the ability to create multiple functions of the same name with different implementations. Calls to an overloaded function will run a specific implementation of that function appropriate to the context of the call, allowing one function call to perform different tasks depending on context. For example, and are overloaded functions. To call the latter, an object must be passed as a parameter, whereas the former does not require a parameter, and is called with an empty parameter field. A common error would be to assign a default value to the object in the second function, which would result in an ''ambiguous call'' error, as the compiler wouldn't know which of the two methods to use. Another example is a function that executes different actions based on whether it's printing text or photos. The two different functions may be overloaded as If we write the overloaded print functions for all objects our ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Parameter (computer Programming)
In computer programming, a parameter or a formal argument is a special kind of variable used in a subroutine to refer to one of the pieces of data provided as input to the subroutine. These pieces of data are the values of the arguments (often called ''actual arguments'' or ''actual parameters'') with which the subroutine is going to be called/invoked. An ordered list of parameters is usually included in the definition of a subroutine, so that, each time the subroutine is called, its arguments for that call are evaluated, and the resulting values can be assigned to the corresponding parameters. Unlike ''argument'' in usual mathematical usage, the ''argument'' in computer science is the actual input expression passed/supplied to a function, procedure, or routine in the invocation/call statement, whereas the ''parameter'' is the variable inside the implementation of the subroutine. For example, if one defines the add subroutine as def add(x, y): return x + y, then x, y are parame ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tête à Toto
The tête à Toto is a French typographical design and children's game, well known to French schoolchildren. It consists of the equation "0+0=0", written with the first two "0"s for eyes, the "+" for a nose, the "=" for a mouth, and the final "0" surrounding, as a stylized face or skull. It is drawn while reciting: Translated: As his head equals zero, it means that his intelligence is null. The name, or character, of Toto is a common stock character in French culture; he is the generic child used in jokes ("Toto asks his mother..."). See Blague de Toto (Toto joke). Other uses *A circumlocution for "zero" *In prostitution, slang for a prostitute – or rather, prospective prostitute – who has not had a single client ( i.e., who has had zero clients). See also *Henohenomoheji ''Henohenomoheji'' ( ja, へのへのもへじ ) or ''hehenonomoheji'' () is a face known to be drawn by Japanese schoolchildren using hiragana characters. It became a popular drawing during the E ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Hacker's Dictionary
The Jargon File is a glossary and usage dictionary of slang used by computer programmers. The original Jargon File was a collection of terms from technical cultures such as the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) and others of the old ARPANET AI/ LISP/PDP-10 communities, including Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Carnegie Mellon University, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. It was published in paperback form in 1983 as ''The Hacker's Dictionary'' (edited by Guy Steele), revised in 1991 as ''The New Hacker's Dictionary'' (ed. Eric S. Raymond; third edition published 1996). The concept of the file began with the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) that came out of early TX-0 and PDP-1 hackers in the 1950s, where the term hacker emerged and the ethic, philosophies and some of the nomenclature emerged. 1975 to 1983 The Jargon File (referred to here as "Jargon-1" or "the File") was made by Raphael Finkel at Stanford in 1975. From that time until the plug was finally pulled on the SA ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
MIT Press
The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (United States). It was established in 1962. History The MIT Press traces its origins back to 1926 when MIT published under its own name a lecture series entitled ''Problems of Atomic Dynamics'' given by the visiting German physicist and later Nobel Prize winner, Max Born. Six years later, MIT's publishing operations were first formally instituted by the creation of an imprint called Technology Press in 1932. This imprint was founded by James R. Killian, Jr., at the time editor of MIT's alumni magazine and later to become MIT president. Technology Press published eight titles independently, then in 1937 entered into an arrangement with John Wiley & Sons in which Wiley took over marketing and editorial responsibilities. In 1962 the association with Wiley came to an end after a further 125 titles had been published. The press acquired its modern name a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
