Boilerplate

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Boilerplate ( originally English for “boiler plate”, translated “standard text , text module ”), also known as a binder , in media work and printing , denotes a constant block of text, usually at the end of a text. In connection with e-mails, the term is also used to refer to the signature . The term is also used in accounting and programming .

public relations

Boilerplate or backgrounder is a term used in PR and media work . It is a text passage at the end of a media release . It contains the most important general information on the organization behind the press release (e.g. number of employees in the company, turnover, locations, industry focus, foundation).

The boilerplate is thus a text block that remains the same over a longer period of time without any direct reference to the current occasion. The boilerplate offers journalists the opportunity to see the activity profile of an organization or a company at a glance.

economy

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In the balance sheet and accounting world there is a complex "disclosure problem" - also known as the boiler plate, the aspects of which are weighted differently by the accounting stakeholders. The companies preparing the balance sheet feel compelled to overload their financial statements with great effort (disclosure overload), some of which they consider to be irrelevant for users. Due to time pressure, among other things, many details are redundant and not very company-specific (boilerplate). One feels compelled to do this by the existing disclosure regulations, compliance with which is checked by auditors and enforcement institutions using checklists.

From the point of view of the billing addressees, boilerplate information, redundancies and information overload increase the information processing costs and are therefore perceived as annoying. More serious, however, is the occasional lack of essential information for which there is currently no explicit disclosure requirement. Therefore, the principle of materiality should be strengthened and the move away from a compliance and checklist mentality should be worked towards.

programming

In programming , the term boilerplate code describes code fragments that are required in many places in a more or less unchanged form. This is more common in programming languages, as more "talkative" ( verbose ) apply, d. H. Demand a lot of coding work from the programmer even for the smallest tasks. The need for boilerplate code can be met through the use of high-level mechanisms such as metaprogramming (whereby the system automatically generates the required boilerplate code) and method modules such as convention prior to configuration (whereby "good" default values ​​are made available so that many implementation details no longer have to be explicitly specified in each project).

The following lines in Perl show an example boilerplate code. They consist of a shebang and two pragmata (which good programming style requires) at the beginning of a source file. These lines are not part of the program logic, but contain information for the runtime environment. 

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

Boilerplate code is often required in preparation for the use of functions from libraries with a low level of abstraction . An example of this is the strcatfunction in C for joining two strings ( string s). In C, character strings are stored as fields of individual characters ( character , data type char ) followed by a null byte (null-terminated character arrays ). The code that you need to concatenate (at least in some way) with strcattwo strings named firstand secondis in a comprehensively commented version, but without the necessary error handling: 

char *result;

/* Allocate memory for the size of the two strings, plus 1 for the terminating NULL character. */
result = malloc( (strlen(first) + strlen(second) + 1) * sizeof(char) );

/* Copy the contents of 'first' to 'result'. */
strcpy(result, first);

/* Append the contents of 'second'. */
strcat(result, second);

…

/* Deallocate the reserved memory when finished */
free(result);

The variable declarations and the instructions mallocand freeare the boilerplate code that is required as a framework for the actual work of the two function calls and must therefore also be written.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Donald Treadwell, Jill B. Treadwell: Public Relations Writing . Principles in Practice. SAGE, 2003, ISBN 978-0-7619-4599-4 .
  2. ↑ Ralf Laemmel, Simon Peyton Jones: Scrap your boilerplate: a practical approach to generic programming . In: Proceedings ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Types in Language Design and Implementation . 2003 ( PS - website ).
  3. ↑ Jörg Hüttmann: Successful online PR: How to write and successfully disseminate press releases for the web for specific target groups . BoD - Books on Demand, 2018, 2018, ISBN 3-7481-8346-1 , pp. 32 .
  4. ↑ What actually is a Abbinder Marketing Börse from August 26, 2011, accessed on June 4, 2019
  5. ↑ How to create a boilerplate PR spies dated April 28, 2018, accessed June 4, 2019
  6. ^ Speech by Hans Hoogervorst at the IFRS Foundation 2013 conference in Amsterdam