From: Dan Halbert <halbert@halwitz.org>
To: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Whence did "XXX" come about?
Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2020 16:54:00 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <930753f9-7b52-03bb-18e9-e61de3fa94c2@halwitz.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CANCZdfrV47EcJb_SfQuETYar=vyEDtbsiCDb8ppK5DNpgmxcWg@mail.gmail.com>
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My guess is that this was invented independently several times. I think
I used it myself in the 70's (and not on UNIX), as soon as I had a text
editor, because "XXX" was easy to search for and was not going to
overlap with variable names, etc.
There's a discussion here:
https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2017-04-17-xxx-fixme
Dan H.
On 9/3/20 4:35 PM, Warner Losh wrote:
> I'll also add that this seemed foreign when I had patches that had XXX
> in them I submitted to the linux folks in the early 90s. It was second
> nature in the BSD side of things. But I don't know if that's a
> Berkeley thing or a Bell Labs thing Berkeley picked up...
>
> Warner
>
> On Thu, Sep 3, 2020 at 12:11 PM Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com
> <mailto:imp@bsdimp.com>> wrote:
>
> The earliest my quick grep could find was 4.0BSD. I didn't find it
> in this sense in pwb, but it was a quick grep...
>
> xxx is used extensively in prior versions, but there it's meaning
> is 'placeholder' or 'don't care'. Mostly for /tmp/XXXX files, but
> also for things like Jxxx handles all the jump commands or dates
> of the form 24 Feb XXXX or stuff like that.
>
> Warner
>
> On Thu, Sep 3, 2020 at 11:34 AM Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org
> <mailto:dave@horsfall.org>> wrote:
>
> For yonks I've been seeing "XXX" as a flag to mean "needs more
> work" or
> "look at this carefully, just in case" etc, and I use it myself.
>
> Whence did it come about? I think I saw it as early as PWB,
> but can't be
> sure.
>
> -- Dave, wondering how many nanny-filters he triggered with "XXX"
>
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2020-09-03 21:03 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 7+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-09-03 17:32 Dave Horsfall
2020-09-03 18:11 ` Warner Losh
2020-09-03 20:35 ` Warner Losh
2020-09-03 20:54 ` Dan Halbert [this message]
2020-09-03 22:13 ` Steve Nickolas
2020-09-04 3:02 ` Christopher Browne
2020-09-03 20:28 ` Warren Toomey
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