Foo bar

where does all the foo and bar references come from, is that from
duntemans assembly book from way back in the day? He had a fake martian
counting system with foo bar bas foobidity etc to use as an example of
how to think differently ab out numbers. Its interesting how that has
become almost a standard with code examples in so many languages.

On 5/13/06, corey konrad [email protected] wrote:

where does all the foo and bar references come from, is that from
duntemans assembly book from way back in the day? He had a fake martian
counting system with foo bar bas foobidity etc to use as an example of
how to think differently ab out numbers. Its interesting how that has
become almost a standard with code examples in so many languages.


Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

Don’t know how accurate it is, but maybe check out
Foobar - Wikipedia I’ll admit that I only skimmed
over it, but it seems to cover what you want.

Pat


When â??fooâ?? is used in connection with â??barâ?? it has generally traced to
the
WWII-era Army slang acronym FUBAR (â??Fucked Up Beyond All Repairâ?? or
â??Fucked
Up Beyond All Recognitionâ??), …

… and lot of many other interesting facts about programming history
and
culture you can find at

----- Original Message -----
From: “corey konrad” [email protected]
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ruby
To: “ruby-talk ML” [email protected]
Sent: Saturday, May 13, 2006 9:12 PM
Subject: foo bar

Sergey V. wrote:


When â??fooâ?? is used in connection with â??barâ?? it has generally
traced to the WWII-era Army slang acronym FUBAR (â??Fucked Up Beyond All
Repairâ?? or â??Fucked Up Beyond All Recognitionâ??), …

On a side note, various early comicstrip characters, such as Krazy Kat,
used “Foo!” as a general exclamation, a trait brought back by Patrick
McDonnell in his “Mutts” strip.


James B.

“The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance, but the illusion
of knowledge.”

  • D. Boorstin

James B. wrote:

Sergey V. wrote:


When â??fooâ?? is used in connection with â??barâ?? it has generally
traced to the WWII-era Army slang acronym FUBAR (â??Fucked Up Beyond
All Repairâ?? or â??Fucked Up Beyond All Recognitionâ??), …

On a side note, various early comicstrip characters, such as Krazy
Kat, used “Foo!” as a general exclamation, a trait brought back by
Patrick McDonnell in his “Mutts” strip.
And of course Smokey Stover used “Foo!” along with the better-known
“Notary Sojac” :slight_smile:

Speaking of FUBAR, SNAFU stands for “Situation Normal – All F***** Up”


M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

I’m pretty sure they all originated – in the computer science world,
that is – at MIT in the early days of the Artificial Intelligence
program. My guess it was late 1950s or early 1960s – somewhere around
the time Lisp 1.5 escaped from MIT.

John G. wrote:

On 5/14/06, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky [email protected] wrote:

Speaking of FUBAR, SNAFU stands for “Situation Normal – All F***** Up”

For a long time I’ve been using “foo”, “bar”, and “baz” as my big
three made-up variable names. No idea where “baz” came from though. I
think I’d heard it or seen it used somewhere, but can’t recall…


M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

For all kinds of fun trivia, check out the “New Hacker’s Dictionary”

http://www.outpost9.com/reference/jargon/jargon_21.html#TAG670

Matt

On 14 May , 2006, at 10:49 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

http://linuxcapacityplanning.com


Matt Long [email protected] /
[email protected]
University of South Florida, CRASAR
GnuPG public key: http://www.csee.usf.edu/~mtlong/public_key.html

Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing,
and obeys the second law of thermodynamics; i.e., it always increases.

-Norman R. Augustine

On 5/14/06, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky [email protected] wrote:

Speaking of FUBAR, SNAFU stands for “Situation Normal – All F***** Up”

For a long time I’ve been using “foo”, “bar”, and “baz” as my big
three made-up variable names. No idea where “baz” came from though. I
think I’d heard it or seen it used somewhere, but can’t recall…

On 14 May 2006, at 10:42 pm, John G. wrote:

For a long time I’ve been using “foo”, “bar”, and “baz” as my big
three made-up variable names. No idea where “baz” came from though. I
think I’d heard it or seen it used somewhere, but can’t recall…

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/B/baz.html implies that it’s
been around since the 50s.

For some reason I always use foo, bar and wibble, but like you, I’ve
no idea where I picked up the third one (probably Blackadder, but
that doesn’t explain why I started associating it with foo and bar).

Kerry

On 5/15/06, Kerry B. [email protected] wrote:

no idea where I picked up the third one (probably Blackadder, but
that doesn’t explain why I started associating it with foo and bar).

Also used foo, bar, baz. Wibble was news to me, had never seen it
until I read the PragProg SVN book [1]. Now, it’s my default project
for doing SVN experiments.

[1] http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/svn/index.html