foo

[Chris F Waigl]

Karl Hagen wrote:
> 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.
>

The etymology of "foo" is, famously, the topic of RFC3092
<http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3092.html>, which is dated 1 April 2001.
Make of that what you will, but the use of "foo" predates K&R, as the
Jargon File entry <http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/F/foobar.html>
mentions as well.

Now when did they start using the term "metasyntactic variable", I wonder.

Cheers,

Chris Waigl

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