As already mentioned, 'foo' and 'bar' come from FUBAR, an Americanization that seemed popular during World War II. Apparently the British were already using U/S for marking 'unserviceable' equipment, but that didn't go down well with the United States. I've also remember seeing 'NFG' on bad EPROM chips when I started working at Motorola in the summer of 1981.

My pal Bob from Burlington once told me that 'foo' came from 'for once only' -- as in, something that you were going to build once and forget. I don't know where 'baz' came from, although I have a friend Mark who is nicknamed 'Baz' -- it's a short form of his last name.

The word sometimes used as a fourth in that group is 'quux', and I'm curious about that one too -- it always makes me think of 'quincux', the name for an arrangement of five items placed in a cross (one in the middle, one above, one below, one to the left and one to the right). It's also a terrific book (so I'm told) written by a first time authour who wrote just a page each night without telling a soul .. but I digress .. as usual ..

--t. alex
Life is short: get busy!

In reply to Re: Origin of 'foo', 'bar', et al? by talexb
in thread Origin of 'foo', 'bar', et al? by yosefm

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.