Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!aplcen!haven!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: "foo" origin
Message-ID: <11651@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 19 Nov 89 06:52:53 GMT
References: <15080002@hpfijdw.HP.COM>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 15

In article <15080002@hpfijdw.HP.COM> jdw@hpfijdw.HP.COM (Jeff Wood) writes:
>In my lengthy career in Computer Science at the University,
>many professors used the acronym "foo".  None of which knew
>its origins.  Examples of code were called "foo.c", functions
>were called "int foo ()".  Do any of you gurus from way
>back know what this stands for????

Yes -- "foo" has two contribution origins.
The obvious one is "phooey" and related terms.
The more interesting one is FUBAR, which you can find in a dictionary.
Examples of filenames were often given as "FOO.BAR" etc.
Some sites adopted a convention that files called "foo" something
("foo files") were junk files that could be deleted without qualms.
Undoubtedly there is more to the history of "foo" than this,
but I hope that suffices.