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No. 48 Vol. 1Fri 08 April 2022Price: 0/0d

Father Perl

pointing finger devlog >> Fri 08 April 2022 by Thran >>

Here is a replacement for the metasyntactic variables (foo, bar, baz) inspired by 90s sitcom Father Ted. To persuade you of its worthiness it will be demonstrated in Perl.

The Proposal

The metasyntactic variables have a proud history demonstrating code use and serving as placeholders in psuedocode, among many other things. See the jargon file entry for their complete history including the American WWII origins of "FUBAR".

However, to break the stale air and bring a touch of overdue irreverence, I propose their replacement. We should instead use "Drink Feck Arse Girls" and any other single-word utterances that can be reliably traced to the eminent cleric, Father Jack.

Father.pl script


#!/usr/bin/env perl
use v5.16;
no warnings;
no diagnostics;

my $arse;
my $nuns = 99; 
my $reverse = "!puc ffo";

sub drink {
    return "feck " x $nuns;
}

my @girls = (($arse=\&drink));

say &{pop @girls} . reverse $reverse if $nuns;

Here, you can see the function "drink" successfully return the specified "fecks" after being passed around a good bit (including a journey through my $arse). I think this is enough to make the case that the venerable "foo" has had its day.

Context

Both Father Ted and The IT Crowd were popular British sitcoms and they maintain a cult following today. Both series were written by the same man, Graham Lineham. This proposal bridges both series, further building its greatness.

Nuns! Reverse! scene from Father Ted: This will further explain my Perl, if you haven't already seen it.

Tags for this writ:

perl, programming, fun,

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