If we look up Foobar on Wikipedia, we'll see they are also called place-holder names or Metasyntactic variable.

We'll go with that and install Acme::MetaSyntactic.

Following its documentation we can write a short example:

use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.010;

use Acme::MetaSyntactic; # loads the default theme
say metaname();

If we run this script it will print out foo. If we run it again it will print bar. Then if we run it a few more times it will give names such as corge, waldo, quux, fred.

This already provides some useful diversity, but let's go beyond that.

OOP

Acme::MetaSyntactic provides an object oriented interface as well, and has a large number of themes. The default being the foo theme.

The first thing we try is the class method called themes that will return all the available themes:

use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.010;

use Acme::MetaSyntactic;

foreach my $t (Acme::MetaSyntactic->themes) {
    say $t;
}

The list of themes that are supplied with the module.

any
contributors
foo

List all the words of a theme

Once we know what themes are available, we can fetch words from the given theme. For this we first call the constructor my $ams = Acme::MetaSyntactic->new; and on the object itself we can call the name method providing to it the theme, and optionally the number of words we would like to receive.

Thus say $ams->name('foo'); will return and print out a single word from the foo theme. say $ams->name('foo', 1); would do the same.

Calling the same method with a bigger number: my @names = $ams->name('foo', 4); will return 4 words. For this, we'd better assign the result to an array for later use or iterate over the returned list. We might even want to sort the words before printing them out.

As a special case, if we pass 0 as the requested number of words, the method will return all the words available in the theme:

use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.010;

use Acme::MetaSyntactic;

my $ams = Acme::MetaSyntactic->new;
foreach my $n (sort $ams->name('foo', 0)) {
    say $n;
}

And the result is:

bar
baz
corge
foo
foobar
fred
fubar
garply
grault
plugh
quux
qux
thud
waldo
xyzzy

A little more diversity, but that's still not enough!

Contributors

When we listed the existing themes, it also showed any, and contributors. What are theses and where are more themes?

If we pass contributors to the name method, we'll get back the list of all the contributors of the module. Would you like to use variable names such as Leon_Brocard or Yanick_Champoux?

More themes

Of course having only these themes would not be really interesting, so Acme::MetaSyntactic is extensible.

Install Acme::MetaSyntactic::Themes, and you will over 130 new themes.

You don't even need to load the extra module the same code we had above, would list all the installed themes:

use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.010;

use Acme::MetaSyntactic;

foreach my $t (sort Acme::MetaSyntactic->themes) {
    say $t;
}

And you'll get 131 entries.

We can go even further. There are several people who contributed additional themes that have not been incorporated into this distribution.

Search for Acme::MetaSyntactic, and you'll find a lot more themes. Alternatively, check out all the modules that depend on Acme::MetaSyntactic. Most likely they are additional themes.

Well, except of Bot-BasicBot-Pluggable-Module-MetaSyntactic which is an IRC front-end to the module.

Task-MetaSyntactic list all the related modules as dependencies, making it super easy to install all of them with one command.

List of modules in the module:Acme::MetaSyntactic namespace.

In the end we have 168 themes.

Of course not everyone will want to install a bunch of Perl modules just to get some good ideas for metasyntactic names. So I created a web interface to the modules so you, too can go Beyond Foo and Bar.