Ned Baker

Ned Baker is a fictional name, not a fictional character. This name is used as a metasyntactic variable, or alias, used in place of a real name that will be supplied at a later time. It is commonly used in the development of computer programs that will handle the names of real people when those programs are complete.

Other names commonly used for this purpose are names containing punctuation (such as Meg O'Brien), to test the ability of the program to handle such punctutation, and names containing database or programming terminology (such as Null Exit), to ensure that such terms used in this context do not affect the function of the program.