From: Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>
To: Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org>
Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Whence did "XXX" come about?
Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2020 14:35:22 -0600 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CANCZdfrV47EcJb_SfQuETYar=vyEDtbsiCDb8ppK5DNpgmxcWg@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CANCZdfqk2e0vHJh_uF6d318=NYWq0DWjd-wMNjSO8jydJ+yz_w@mail.gmail.com>
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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> 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> 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 20:36 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 [this message]
2020-09-03 20:54 ` Dan Halbert
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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