Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!jarthur!usc!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!harpsichord.cis.ohio-state.edu!lwh From: lwh@harpsichord.cis.ohio-state.edu (Loyde W. Hales II) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: !?!? FOO??? Message-ID: <81940@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> Date: 6 Jul 90 16:50:43 GMT References: <369@demott.COM> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Reply-To: Loyde W. Hales II Organization: Ohio State University Computer and Information Science Lines: 46 >In article hart@blackjack.dt.navy.mil (Michael Hart) writes: >>In <13530001@hp-and.HP.COM> panek@hp-and.HP.COM (Jon Panek) writes: >>> F003 Divide by zero >>> F001 Printer not ready >> >>>and the like. When the machine ran into one of these, it would load the >>>This explanation would go a long ways to explaining why "FOO" has >>>appeared in the hacker community, as well as some support for its >>>age. >> >>>Any agreement on this? >>I would have to agree with the military origin; especially as >>FOO is usually seen in close proximity to it's brother variable, >>BAR. In article <369@demott.COM> kdq@demott.COM (Kevin D. Quitt) writes: > I dunnow. It seems to me that given the FOO name for the errors, >the BAR part would come right along (from the military). It makes a lot >more sense than converting FU to FOO. I disagree, for several reasons. First, it is common to distort spellings, particularly when you are taking spoken word. Look at how many words in (American) English are mispelled words (in British English). Much less the number of words with multiple spellings considered correct. If you want to test this, though, go to an introductory course for Computer Science and throw out terminology without writing it on the board. Then give a quiz. I'll bet you'll get several mispellings and homonymns. - Personally, if someone said *fu* to me, I'd think to spell it Foo, unless I knew it had Oriental origins. Besides, FOOBAR is a polite version of FUBAR anyway. -=- Department of Computer and Information Science Loyde W. Hales, II The Ohio State University lwh@cis.ohio-state.edu 2036 Neil Avenue Mall, Columbus, Ohio 43210