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From: charles@dragon.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: fubar is not a vegetable
Message-ID: <585@dragon.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 28-Oct-87 13:20:03 EST
Article-I.D.: dragon.585
Posted: Wed Oct 28 13:20:03 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 31-Oct-87 18:40:24 EST
Reply-To: charles@dragon.UUCP (Charles Wolff, x3432)
Distribution: na
Organization: Motorola Microcomputer Division, Tempe, Az.
Lines: 16

Since Comp.unix.wizards is currently a discussion of favorite variable
names, I'll mention the "fruits convention" a friend and I came up with
while teaching a bunch of novice users the rudiments of IBM jcl.  The
convention was that, anywhere we used the name of a fruit in an example,
it mean you could use any (syntactically correct) name you wanted.

For example, when we gave an example of how to define an input file,
instead of saying //INPUT DD ...  we'd use //APPLES DD ...  Any other
references to that particular input file in the rest of the jcl
(or source code, etc.) would also refer to APPLES.

This made it clear which names were significant and which could be
"anything you choose".  Saved us a lot of questions about "if I have
two input files, what do I have to call the second one?".  Of course,
we ended up with a whole lot of files on the system called "apples",
but that's how it goes...