This is in the jargon file:
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/foobar.html
Cheers,
Kevin
On Wed, May 16, 2001 at 09:07:11AM -0400, Brett W. McCoy ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
spew-ed forth:
> On Wed, 16 May 2001, ber kessels wrote:
>
> > Maybe a silly question but where does foo-bar or foobar refer to?
> >
> > Everyone uses it in perl, but I cannot find the origin of it.
> > I am not english (I am Duch), but even my english teacher didn't know it, he had
> > even never heard of it.
>
> foo and bar are, to put it simply, the canonical metasyntactic variables
> used in programming examples. :-) You see thenm used all the time in C
> coding examples: "Take function foo and pass it value bar..."
>
> The actual phrase supposedly derives from an old (probably US) Army term
> FUBAR -- Fouled[0] Up Beyond All Recognition.
>
> -- Brett
>
> [0] Or any other F word you choose to use to indicate a bad situation
>
--
[Writing CGI Applications with Perl - http://perlcgi-book.com]
"As the fletcher whittles and makes straight his arrows, so the master directs
his straying thoughts."
-- Buddha
