[TUHS] Whence did "XXX" come about?
Dan Halbert
halbert at halwitz.org
Fri Sep 4 06:54:00 AEST 2020
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 at bsdimp.com
> <mailto:imp at 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 at horsfall.org
> <mailto:dave at 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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