Re: FOO vs FO

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Subject: Re: FOO vs FO
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 06 Sep 2001 13:49:38 -0400

I think we are asymptotically approaching some kind of "knowledge" on this important question.

My own folk etymology cortical implant tells me that "Foobar" is an adaptation of "FUBAR", a military acronym (originally ca. WWII) that stands for "f****d up beyond all recognition". As in "Situation normal -- foobar".

(Jim, "Fouled Up Beyond All Belief" would be "FUBAB" wouldn't it? but it'd get past your obscenity filter anyhow.)

How it got from that, to being CS nonsense-word placeholders, I dunno. But of course a great deal of early programming happened in the military. David Marston's explanation of "foo" from the Smokey Stover comic strip seems (to this ear) altogether plausible. Maybe when they needed a second one, since they had "foo" they went to "bar" since they all knew about "fubar" (and didn't care too much how it was spelled).

Anyone have a notion as to "baz"?

Anyway,
Wendell

At 07:58 AM 9/6/01, Doug wrote:

Does anyone know why FOO was chosen to mean anything?

>From the W3 site, in a message at
"http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/msg00613.html", someone asked
"What does foo.bar mean in CSS?". The response was:

Ah, a puzzle!

        1. The literal answer is probably not the answer the author is
looking for.

        2. `foo' and `bar' are commonly used as placeholders for arbitrary
character strings.

In XML Bible by E. Harold, page 52, the author says that FOO means "whatever
you want it to". Further down, on page 517, we find that for formatting
objects, the defacto standard prefix is "FO".

Why was FOO and FO chosen instead of something less confusing? I can
understand FO for formatting objects, but why FOO? Why not XXX or ABC??

XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list


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Current Thread

Re: FOO vs FO, (continued)
- Chris Bayes - Thu, 6 Sep 2001 08:27:03 -0400 (EDT)
- Michael Kay - Thu, 6 Sep 2001 08:40:40 -0400 (EDT)
  - Richard Beels - Fri, 7 Sep 2001 11:54:35 -0400 (EDT)
- Wendell Piez - Thu, 6 Sep 2001 14:22:20 -0400 (EDT) <=
  - Jennifer Hochgesang - Thu, 6 Sep 2001 14:43:19 -0400 (EDT)
  - Mitch C Amiano - Thu, 6 Sep 2001 16:55:41 -0400 (EDT)
  - Tony Graham - Fri, 7 Sep 2001 04:24:47 -0400 (EDT)
- Ben Robb - Thu, 6 Sep 2001 08:26:34 -0400 (EDT)

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RE: FOO vs FO, Richard Beels	Thread	Re: FOO vs FO, Jennifer Hochgesang
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