Why does programming use foo

News and Special Offers occasional. Techopedia Explains Foo. What Does Foo Mean? Techopedia Explains Foo The meaning of foo in computer programming and pseudocode varies. Share this Term. Tech moves fast! Take a look at the history of "foobar" on Wikipedia. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. What is the origin of foo and bar? Asked 10 years, 8 months ago.

Active 8 years, 2 months ago. Viewed k times. Duplicate: programmers. Active Oldest Votes. The Tech newspaper , a year earlier, the Letter to the Editor, September : By the time the train has reached the station the neophytes are so filled with the stories of the glory of Phi Omicron Omicron, usually referred to as Foo, that they are easy prey.

Hopefully yours, Indignant Mother of Five. And The Tech in December : General trend of thought might be best interpreted from the remarks made at the end of the ballots. I want to be an instant success and snow customers. Send me a degree in Foo Counters Foo Jung Let's find "foo", "bar" and "foobar" published in code examples.

Some more recallations. Walter Mitty recalled on this site in I second the jargon file regarding Foo Bar. Everett recalls in When I joined DEC in , foobar was already being commonly used as a throw-away file name. Smith in Dick Gruen had a device in his dorm room, the usual assemblage of B-battery, resistors, capacitors, and NE-2 neon tubes, which he called a "foo counter. Wexelblat in The earliest PDP-1 Assembler used two characters for symbols 18 bit machine programmers always left a few words as patch space to fix problems.

Community Bot 1 1 1 silver badge. Hugo Hugo 24k 6 6 gold badges 71 71 silver badges 89 89 bronze badges. That is a thorough answer! The word "foo" frequently appeared on license plates of cars, in nonsense sayings in the background of some frames such as "He who foos last foos best" or "Many smoke but foo men chew" , and Holman had Smokey say "Where there's foo, there's fire". Then there are GUI widgets.

I know the word predates computers as a generalized business school expression of "some unit of produced goods", eg, from ACME Corporation. But where did the word "widget" come from? Most dictionaries fail to trace it to its origin.

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