foo

[Karl Hagen]

I think (if my memory servers) that it was at popularized by Kerninghan
and Ritchie in their classic book _The C Programming Language_ (1978). I
can't seem to find my copy now, but Google Books shows other instances
of foo & bar as dummy variables cropping up in the early 80's, which is
about right if K&R were the originators.

Based on the document here: http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-tutor.html,
which appears to be an early tutorial on a pre K&R version of C (1974),
Kerninghan was using at least "foo" as a dummy variable as early as that.

Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      foo
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> in my Griffwords posting to Language Log, i quoted the Smokey Stover
> wikipedia page:
>
> "Foo" was one of these recurring nonsense words and was taken up by
> World War II's "Foo Fighters". Foo may have been inspired by the
> French word for fire, feu, but Holman never gave a straight answer as
> to the origin.
>
> -----
>
> now a reader asks about foo:
>
> Not sure if there's a historical/etymological connection, but if foo
> postdates fubar (military acronym for fucked up beyond all
> recognition, later adopted as the standard tokens for user-supplied
> arguments early in the literature of symbolic programming languages
> as foo and bar), that might be a likelier source than the French feu,
> etc.
>
> -----
>
> anybody have information on the history here?
>
> arnold
>
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