What does foo really mean

Question

I hope this qualifies as a programming question  as in any programming tutorial  you eventually come across  foo  in the code examples   yeah  right    what does  foo  really mean   If it is meant to mean nothing  when did it begin to be used so

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Among my colleagues  the meaning  or perhaps more accurately - the use  of the term  foo  has been to serve as a placeholder to represent an example for a name  Examples include  but not limited to  yourVariableName  yourObjectName  or yourColumnName   Today  I avoid using  foo  and prefer using this type of named substitution for a couple of reasons     In my earlier days  I originally found the use of  foo  as a placement in any example to represent something as f d-up to be confusing  I wanted a working example  not something that was foobar  Your results may vary  but I always  100   everytime  never-failed  got more follow-up questions about the meaning of the actual variable where  foo  was used

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I think it s meant to mean nothing  The wiki says    Foo is commonly used with the metasyntactic variables bar and foobar

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As definition of  Foo  has lot s of meanings    bar  and baz are often compounded together to make such words as foobar  barbaz  and foobaz  www nationmaster com encyclopedia Metasyntactic-variable Major concepts in CML  usually mapped directly onto XMLElements  to be discussed later   wwmm ch cam ac uk blogs cml  Measurement of the total quantity of pasture in a paddock  expressed in kilograms of pasture dry matter per hectare  kg DM ha  www lifetimewool com au glossary aspx Forward Observation Officer  An artillery officer who remained with infantry and tank battalions to set up observation posts in the front lines from which to observe enemy positions and radio the coordinates of targets to the guns further in the rear  members fortunecity com lniven definition htm is the first metasyntactic variable commonly used  It is sometimes combined with bar to make foobar  This suggests that foo may have originated with the World War II slang term fubar  as an acronym for fucked fouled up beyond all recognition  although the Jargon File makes a pretty good case     explanation-guide info meaning Metasyntactic-variable html Foo is a metasyntactic variable used heavily in computer science to represent concepts abstractly and can be used to represent any part of a     en wikipedia org wiki FOo Foo is the world of dreams  no its not  in Obert Skye s Leven Thumps series  Although it has many original inhabitants  most of its current dwellers are from Reality  and are known as nits      en wikipedia org wiki Foo  place  Also foo     Representation of fool  foolish person   in a Mr  T accent en wiktionary org wiki foo   Resource  google

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The sound of the french fou   like  amour fou   crazy  written in english  would be foo  wouldn t it  Else furchtbar -  foobar -  foo  bar -  barfoo -  barfu    barefoot   Just fou  A foot without teeth    I agree with all  who mentioned it means  nothing interesting  just something  usually needed to complete a statement expression

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foo   File or Object  It is used in place of an object variable or file name

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In my opinion every programmer has his or her own  words  that is used every time you need an arbitrary word when programming   For some people it s the first words from a childs song  for other it s names and for other its something completely different  Now for the programmer community there are these  words  as well  and these words are  foo  and  bar   The use of this is that if you have to communicate publicly about programming you don t have to say that you would use arbitratry words  you would simply write  foo  or  bar  and every programmer knows that this is just arbitrary words

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It s a metasyntactic variable

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foo is used as a place-holder name  usually in example code to signify that the object being named  or the choice of name  is not part of the crux of the example  foo is often followed by bar  baz  and even bundy  if more than one such name is needed  Wikipedia calls these names Metasyntactic Variables  Python programmers supposedly use spam  eggs  ham  instead of foo  etc   There are good uses of foo in SA   I have also seen foo used when the programmer can t think of a meaningful name  as a substitute for tmp  say   but I consider that to be a misuse of foo

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See  RFC 3092  Etymology of  Foo   D  Eastlake 3rd et al   Quoting only the relevant definitions from that RFC for brevity         Used very generally as a sample name for absolutely anything  esp      programs and files  esp  scratch files     First on the standard list of metasyntactic variables used in     syntax examples  bar  baz  qux  quux  corge  grault  garply      waldo  fred  plugh  xyzzy  thud    JARGON

[language-agnostic] What does 'foo' really mean?

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