Personally I use the word "MEOW" because
a) it's easy to search for and spot in logs
b) it will (hopefully) never be a legitimate string in the kind of things I work on
c) fairly unlikely to cause offence (unless the customer is a dog)
Hope you aren’t inspecting COM or DCOM data then. Those MEOW all over the place.
> The header of the marshaled object reference begins with a distinguished signature (‘MEOW’)⁶ [...].
> ⁶ A Microsoft Program Manager who shall remain anonymous claims that MEOW stands for Microsoft Extended Object Wire representation. The author, while somewhat gullible, is skeptical of this story but is willing to give the aforementioned source the benefit of the doubt.
Some time ago, when working on glue code between Excel and our product, I was very fed up with being unable to do exceptions or other sane error-handling on the VBA side. So, I wrote up some code with ```On Error GoTo hell```, which got me a public lecture.
Now, when I'm not required to use some other name, I tend to name my error handlers "hope".
MEOW fits in 4 bytes and the string is probably aligned on 4-bytes boundary (being at the start of the reference) So probably not a bad choice for a binary protocol.
Our testers (China and India) know that when they see KURWA or DUPA in logs that to send it straight to the polish site, we are considering adding a hook to check for those
