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> The inconvenient part of XXX are the false positives when searching.

Would you mind elaborating what kind of source code contains numerous triplets of the uppercase character "X" and why?

I have never seen such code other than produced by extremely inexperienced programmers/students with no imagination to naming symbols and ending up with "x", "xx", "xxx" variable names; even those cases will most likely not be all uppercase.




There's several good examples early in the article. Mostly, they end up in comments, where they're used as templates (e.g. "a social security number is of the form XXX-XX-XXXX").


When defining fields in COBOL, you use a series of 'X' or '9' to denote the field type (alpha or numeric) and the length.





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