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foo, bar, thud, grunt
This series was popular at CMU. Other CMU-associated variables include gorp.
foo, bar, fum
This series is reported to be common at XEROX PARC.
fred, barney
See the entry for fred. These tend to be Britishisms.
corge, grault, flarp
Popular at Rutgers University and among GOSMACS hackers.
zxc, spqr, wombat
Cambridge University (England).
shme
Berkeley, GeoWorks, Ingres. Pronounced /shme/ with a short /e/.
snork
Brown University, early 1970s.
foo, bar, zot
Helsinki University of Technology, Finland.
blarg, wibble
New Zealand.
toto, titi, tata, tutu
France.
pippo, pluto, paperino
Italy. Pippo /pee'po/ and Paperino /pa-peree'-no/ are the Italian names for Goofy and Donald Duck.
aap, noot, mies
The Netherlands. These are the first words a child used to learn to spell on a Dutch spelling board.

Of all these, only foo and bar are universal (and baz nearly so). The compounds foobar and foobaz also enjoy very wide currency.
Some jargon terms are also used as metasyntactic names; barf and mumble, for example. See also Commonwealth Hackish for discussion of numerous metasyntactic variables found in Great Britain and the Commonwealth.
MFTL /M-F-T-L/ [abbreviation: 'My Favorite Toy Language/] 1. adj. Describes a talk on a programming language design that is heavy on the syntax (with lots of BNF), sometimes even talks about semantics (e.g., type systems), but rarely, if ever, has any content (see content-free). More broadly applied to talks even when the topic is not a programming language in which the subject matter is gone into in unnecessary and meticulous detail at the sacrifice of any conceptual content. "Well, it was a typical MFTL talk". 2. n. Describes a language about which the developers are passionate (often to the point of proselytic zeal) but no one else cares about. Applied to the

 
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