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The terms foobar (), foo, bar, baz, and others are used as
metasyntactic variable A metasyntactic variable is a specific word or set of words identified as a placeholder in computer science and specifically computer programming. These words are commonly found in source code and are intended to be modified or substituted before ...
s and
placeholder name Placeholder names are words that can refer to things or people whose names do not exist, are temporarily forgotten, are not relevant to the salient point at hand, are to avoid stigmatization, are unknowable/unpredictable in the context in wh ...
s in
computer programming Computer programming is the process of performing a particular computation (or more generally, accomplishing a specific computing result), usually by designing and building an executable computer program. Programming involves tasks such as anal ...
or computer-related documentation. - Etymology of "Foo" They have been used to name entities such as variables, functions, and
command Command may refer to: Computing * Command (computing), a statement in a computer language * COMMAND.COM, the default operating system shell and command-line interpreter for DOS * Command key, a modifier key on Apple Macintosh computer keyboards * ...
s whose exact identity is unimportant and serve only to demonstrate a concept.


History and etymology

It is possible that ''foobar'' is a playful
allusion Allusion is a figure of speech, in which an object or circumstance from unrelated context is referred to covertly or indirectly. It is left to the audience to make the direct connection. Where the connection is directly and explicitly stated (as ...
to the
World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...
-era military slang FUBAR (''Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition)''. According to an
Internet Engineering Task Force The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster or requirements an ...
RFC, the word FOO originated as a nonsense word with its earliest documented use in the 1930s comic ''
Smokey Stover ''Smokey Stover'' is an American comic strip written and drawn by cartoonist Bill Holman (cartoonist), Bill Holman from March 10, 1935, until he retired in 1972 and distributed through the ''Chicago Tribune''. It features the misadventures of t ...
'' by Bill Holman. Holman states that he used the word due to having seen it on the bottom of a jade Chinese figurine in San Francisco Chinatown, purportedly signifying "good luck". If true, this is presumably related to the Chinese word '' fu'' ("", sometimes transliterated ''foo'', as in '' foo dog''), which can mean ''happiness'' or ''blessing''. The first known use of the terms in print in a programming context appears in a 1965 edition of MIT's ''
Tech Engineering News ''Tech Engineering News'' was a student-run publication at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1920 to 1976. It started as an advertising supplement for '' The Tech'' in 1920, and its last issue was Volume 60 No. 1. In 1952, it publishe ...
''. The use of ''foo'' in a programming context is generally credited to the
Tech Model Railroad Club The Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) is a student organization at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Historically it has been a wellspring of hacker culture and the oldest such hacking group in North America. Formed in 1946, its HO sc ...
(TMRC) of
MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
from circa 1960. In the complex model system, there were
scram A scram or SCRAM is an emergency shutdown of a nuclear reactor effected by immediately terminating the fission reaction. It is also the name that is given to the manually operated kill switch that initiates the shutdown. In commercial reacto ...
switches located at numerous places around the room that could be thrown if something undesirable was about to occur, such as a train moving at full power towards an obstruction. Another feature of the system was a digital clock on the dispatch board. When someone hit a scram switch, the clock stopped and the display was replaced with the word "FOO"; at TMRC the scram switches are, therefore, called "Foo switches". Because of this, an entry in the 1959 ''Dictionary of the TMRC Language'' went something like this: "FOO: The first syllable of the misquoted sacred chant phrase ' foo mane padme hum.' Our first obligation is to keep the foo counters turning." One book describing the MIT train room describes two buttons by the door labeled "foo" and "bar". These were general-purpose buttons and were often repurposed for whatever fun idea the MIT hackers had at the time, hence the adoption of foo and bar as general-purpose variable names. An entry in the ''Abridged Dictionary of the TMRC Language'' states: ''Foobar'' was used as a variable name in the Fortran code of ''
Colossal Cave Adventure ''Colossal Cave Adventure'' (also known as ''Adventure'' or ''ADVENT'') is a text-based adventure game, released in 1976 by developer Will Crowther for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. It was expanded upon in 1977 by Don Woods. In the game, the ...
'' (1977 Crowther and Woods version). The variable FOOBAR was used to contain the player's progress in saying the magic phrase "Fee Fie Foe Foo".
Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 ser ...
also used the term ''foo'' in their programming documentation in 1978.


Examples in culture

* Foo Camp is an annual
hacker convention A computer security conference is a convention for individuals involved in computer security. They generally serve as meeting places for system and network administrators, hackers, and computer security experts. Events Common activities at hacke ...
. * BarCamp, an international network of user-generated conferences * During the ''
United States v. Microsoft Corp. ''United States v. Microsoft Corporation'', 253 F.3d 34 (D.C. Cir. 2001), was a landmark American antitrust law case at the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The U.S. government accused Microsoft of illegally ...
'' trial, some evidence was presented that Microsoft had tried to use the
Web Services Interoperability The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) was an industry consortium created in 2002 and chartered to promote interoperability amongst the stack of web services specifications. WS-I did not define standards for web services; rather, it ...
organization (WS-I) as a means to stifle competition, including e-mails in which top executives including
Bill Gates William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate and philanthropist. He is a co-founder of Microsoft, along with his late childhood friend Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions ...
referred to the WS-I using the codename "foo". *
Foobar2000 foobar2000 (often abbreviated as fb2k or f2k) is a freeware audio player for Microsoft Windows, iOS and Android developed by Peter Pawłowski. It has a modular design, which provides user flexibility in configuration and customization. Stan ...
is an audio player. * Google uses a web tool called "foobar" to recruit new employees. * The Foo Bar is a pub in the Leiden University's faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science.


See also

*
Alice and Bob Alice and Bob are fictional characters commonly used as placeholders in discussions about cryptographic systems and protocols, and in other science and engineering literature where there are several participants in a thought experiment. The Al ...
*
Foo fighter The term ''foo fighter'' was used by Allied aircraft pilots during World War II to describe various UFOs or mysterious aerial phenomena seen in the skies over both the European and Pacific theaters of operations. Though ''foo fighter'' initial ...
* Foo was here * xyzzy * :Variable (computer science) *
Fu (character) The character ''Fú'' (, Unicode U+798F) meaning "fortune" or "good luck" is represented both as a Chinese ideograph and, at times, pictorially, in one of its homophonous forms. It is often found on a figurine of the male god of the same name, ...


References


External links


The Jargon File entry on "foobar"
catb.org * {{IETF RFC, 1639 – FTP Operation Over Big Address Records (FOOBAR) Placeholder names Computer programming folklore Articles with example C code