OT: FooBar (was Bad Factor)

[Dar Scott]

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