Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!rutgers!columbia!cunixc!cunixd.cc.columbia.edu!gm
From: gm@cunixd.cc.columbia.edu (Gary Mathews)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: "foo" origin
Message-ID: <2214@cunixc.cc.columbia.edu>
Date: 19 Nov 89 08:07:13 GMT
References: <15080002@hpfijdw.HP.COM>
Sender: news@cunixc.cc.columbia.edu
Reply-To: gm@cunixd.cc.columbia.edu (Gary Mathews)
Organization: Columbia University
Lines: 20

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????
>
>Jeff Wood.foo

	To my knowledge "foo" comes from "foo bar", which was another way of
writing "fubar".  Finally, "fubar" is an acronyn for "F*cked Up Beyond All
Repair", which describes most software and hardware today.  Well, that's what
one of my profesors told me, so please flame to /dev/null if you want to.

Gary
--
Gary Jason Mathews      | gm@cunixd.cc.columbia.edu    gm@cunixd (BITNET 
Columbia University     | Death is life's way of telling you you've been fired.
------------------------+ CPU time flies when you have a lot of bugs