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toto, The Francophone foo
Posted by shan_man on January 16, 2006 at 08:22 AM | Comments (14)
Do the toto!
Shortly before the holidays, I had the opportunity to visit a customer site in the
wonderful city of Montreal, Canada. I was an eater of excellent food, a seer of
new sites, and a lucky fan at Centre Bell
when the Montreal Canadians won their first
overtime shootout under the new NHL rules! And that was just in the off hours. I also
truly enjoyed myself during the day in the company of the folks whom I met,
who, by the way, are all very savvy and are doing powerful things with Java and Swing.
I thank them for their friendly hospitality, for switching to English during my visit,
and for encouraging my multiple attempts at expanding my French vocabulary
(Je voudrais des frites, s'il vous plait). I also thank them for introducing me
to toto. The introduction went something like this:
We were sitting in a conference room, where it was my turn at the whiteboard to demonstrate
code snippets. So I began: boolean foo = ... And then
I stopped, for suddenly (and I don't what prompted it) I was unsure if they'd ever met
foo. Feeling it was important to know before continuing, I asked them straight out.
Gesturing over my shoulders with both hands towards the board, I asked them: "Do you foo?"
Well I assume they took my gestures out of context, for the next few seconds were
extremely comical. I watched as they looked at each other, and some non-verbal communication
passsed between them. Then, looking back at me akwardly, they slowly pushed back their chairs
and rose. Beginning a cute little dance, they responded in the negative: "Non...nous ne foo pas. But we toto!"
Alright, okay, so the true story is a lot less entertaining. In actuality, I did ask about the
use of foo in French programming and, in fact, these gentlemen had not seen it before.
But, being that these were smart guys, they deduced exactly what it represented.
And that's how it came about that they introduced me to foo's French counterpart
toto. You see, where we'd normally talk using "foo", "bar" or "baz"
in English, as a proper francophone you should correctly use the French "toto", "titi" or "tata".
And while I personally couldn't get Dorothy's little
puppy out of my head for the first
hour, I eventually became very comfortable with this. Due to their pattern that has you alternating
hands between letters (LEFT: t - RIGHT: o - LEFT: t - RIGHT: o), some of these little guys are exceptionally easy to
type - and can be entered even faster than the three-letter foo! Give it a try.
But what about the words themselves? Is "toto" as steeped in culture as the English "foo"? Is "titi" a direct
translation of our "bar", the place where programmers rejuvinate on coffee between late-night coding sessions?
And what about "tata", a word I've actually used myself when speaking with my two-year-old sons; as in
"tata honey, please give Daddy back the digital camera that you're not supposed to be playing with."
Well it turns out that these words are designed to have no inherent meaning at all when we use them to talk
about computer systems. With a little googling, I've discovered that all of these words, English and French alike,
belong to a group with the easy-to-remember name of metasyntactic variables. They are so-called,
according to Wikipedia and
The Jargon File,
because (a) "They are variables in the metalanguage used to talk about programs, etc." and (b)
"They are variables whose values are often variables (as in usages like 'the value of f(foo, bar) is the sum of foo and bar')."
Nifty - so someone's named some of the nonsense that we programmers instinctively understand!
But what I find particularly interesting, since I'd never considered it before, is that the implementation
of the concept varies across cultures and languages. Again reading from
Wikipedia,
I've learned that when programming in Estonia you may need to refer to the "kalatehas (fish factory)" or maybe
"oxe (misspelled vomit)". And in Italy, according to
The Jargon File,
be prepared to be introduced to "pippo (Goofy)" and "paperino (Donald Duck)".
Cool! By happening to discover the non-universality of foo, I met his francophone twin toto,
became more cultured, and learned about a universal concept. I'd say my visit to Montreal was quite succesful!
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Comments
Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first) | Post Comment
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And many french programmers know foo AND toto :)
Posted by: gfx on January 16, 2006 at 08:47 PM
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and others don't know about foo OR toto. Now I understand why I never understood the meaning of foo .. there is none. Also it is the first time that I hear about toto and baz.
Posted by: imjames on January 16, 2006 at 09:56 PM
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IMHO, "toto" usage in french as "dummy word" comes from the very old and famous "toto jokes". Silly dummy jokes that tells you about fun stuffs/stories that has happened to the main character, a little dummy boy named "toto".
Google to "histoires de toto" or "blagues de toto" to see ;-)
AFAIK, toto is an north italian first name, so maybe the roots of the jokes are from over this country as in previous centuries there were lots of migrants comming from italy in France but not sure...
"titi" was introduced when the warner called "titi" the Tweaty bird :)
So what about "tata" .... well, I think this is just a vowel sequence on the words :
toto
titi
....
tata !
You would have asked, why not tutu ? because it is already a noun ( a dress for balerin at opera) ... and "tete" ... is french for "head" (to be exact tête)
Here s what I get so far ;-)
Posted by: bjb on January 17, 2006 at 01:58 AM
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In french (in Quebec to be more precise), we sometimes say that someone is "tata" meaning that he is a little less than stupid. Another word for this would be "nono" or even "toto".
The first time I realized that native english programmers did not know about toto was when I submitted a bug report with example code using variables named toto ;-)
Posted by: barthed on January 17, 2006 at 05:32 AM
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Nice article I had never taught about it but I remember in university the teacher was always using them. Like the previous poster said if you tell someone is "toto" or "tata" in Quebec, it's mean the guy is not very smart. But don't try that in France, it is a pure french canadian word :)
By the way, next time you are in Montreal, you should also spend a couple days in Quebec city my hometown especially if you come with your girlfriend or wife. From my experience, girls always find it really romantic. American call it "cheap Paris".
Posted by: madtree on January 17, 2006 at 05:53 AM
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I love TOTO the rock band!
Posted by: caritony on January 17, 2006 at 07:13 AM
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If you're wondering, 'tata' is also the child-name for 'aunt' in french ('tonton' is 'uncle'). But some aunts and uncles don't like being called 'tata' or 'tonton' ;-)
Posted by: dfuchs on January 17, 2006 at 07:35 AM
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> If you're wondering, 'tata' is also the child-name for 'aunt' in
> french ('tonton' is 'uncle'). But some aunts and uncles don't
> like being called 'tata' or 'tonton' ;-)
Yeah but we never say that in Quebec even if we know what it means. It a typical european expression I guess :)
Posted by: madtree on January 17, 2006 at 08:22 AM
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Duh, Wikipedia forgot abut Poland, of course ;) The Polish translation mentions "sepulka", taken from Stanisław Lem's stories of Ijon Tichy, but by far the most popular metasyntactic variable in Poland is (za przeproszeniem) "dupa" (slang name for the body part you sit on ;)) There are also personal sequences... At least I have one: blah, ple, bul, sru, tutu (I can on Wikipedia see that variations of "bla" are very popular...)
Posted by: jezuch on January 17, 2006 at 09:35 AM
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Of course in India when the time comes to depart for one of the two meeting parties, they say TATA and wave their hands.
Posted by: tchangu on January 17, 2006 at 09:10 PM
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barthed said:
> The first time I realized that native english programmers did not know
> about toto was when I submitted a bug report with example code using
> variables named toto ;-)
Using toto as a variable name might be a little misleading for people who know a little Latin. I would take toto to mean "total". The standard Latin phrase "in toto" means "in total", i.e. completely, entirely.
Oh... and tata. Of course I've heard ta ta (two words) used as a synonym for bye. It's common enough that I even recognize "TTFN" at the end of an email to be "Ta ta for now." However, I've just as often heard it in phrases such as "bodacious tatas", referring to a well-endowed lady's assets.
I certainly wouldn't mind seeing more tatas in toto.
Posted by: ryanker on January 19, 2006 at 07:27 AM
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"bodacious tatas", HA! Too funny :)
I'll admit that this definition did cross my mind while writing my blog entry. But I wasn't sure of the suitability of me broadcasting this to the world. So I'm glad someone had the courage to make us laugh!
Posted by: shan_man on January 19, 2006 at 07:36 AM
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If you happen to enjoy reading RFCs, it turns out that Motorola, Xerox and others teamed together in 2001 to craft RFC 3092 - Etymology of "Foo". The purpose was to rectify the problem of newcomers not understanding the origin of "foo", "bar" and "foobar". Interestingly, at the time, 212 (or about 7%) of the RFCs so far, contained one of these metasyntactic variables without proper explanation or definition.
Posted by: shan_man on January 19, 2006 at 07:56 AM
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