OT: FooBar (was Bad Factor)

[Dave LeYanna]

I feel so sheepish! I just followed and believed! I never dawned on me that 
the relationship between "fubar" and "foobar" could have started in one 
person's head just because they liked the sound! Now that I think about it 
there is nothing fubarish about foobat except the sound.

While your post may not have advanced the science of xTalk very much, it 
sure reminded me to watch out who/what I submit to as an authority. Those 
darn official looking  and sounding web pages! Just because Google gives 
doesn't mean we must accept.

djl

At 03:06 PM 1/31/03 -0700, you wrote:

>On Friday, January 31, 2003, at 02:37 PM, Alex Rice wrote:
>
>>Correct, but it's more interesting than that. The metasyntactic "foo" was 
>>adopted into the "fubar" phase as "foobar". But foo is the real 
>>interesting character of the bunch. The Jargon File has a lengthy and 
>>interesting entymology of foo.
>
>They may be related, but I have never seen these associated.  "foobar" is 
>an arbitrary symbol.  I have never seen it related to fubar.  I expect 
>somebody liked the idea of their being related and associated the two.
>
>I first saw foo and foobar in some lisp code in the 50s.  It seems like I 
>have seen early lisp code that used foo without a related foobar.
>I'm not sure, but I think I have seen it in a logic paper from the 30's or 
>40's, maybe earlier.
>
>My guess is that foobar is not related to fubar.
>
>Dar
>
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||   Dave LeYanna                 ||
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