Foobar is a common placeholder name also referred to as metasyntactic variable used in computer programming or computer related documentation. Foobar can mean: Foobar - an all-purpose placeholder name commonly used in computing foobar2000 - audio player for Windows Fubar (movie) - 2002 Canadian mockumentary FOOBAR - FTP Operation Over Big Address Records (RFC 1639, FTP) This is a disambiguation page: a list of articles associated with the same title. ... For other uses, see FUBAR (disambiguation). ... Placeholder names are words that can refer to objects or people whose names are either irrelevant or unknown in the context in which it is being discussed. ... A metasyntactic variable is a placeholder name, or an alias term, commonly used to denote the subject matter under discussion, or an arbitrary member of a class of things under discussion. ... Programming redirects here. ...

The word "foobar" may be derived from the WW II era Army slang acronym FUBAR (`Fucked Up Beyond All Repair'), later modified to foobar and carried back by returning GIs to morph into other uses. In technology, the word was probably originally propagated through DEC system manuals by Digital Equipment Corporation or DEC in 1960s and early 1970s. Another possibility is that foobar evolved from electronics, as an inverted foo signal. This is because a digital signal is active low (so a negative or zero-voltage condition represents a "1") then a horizontal bar is commonly placed over the signal label. The Jargon File makes a case that foo possibly predates fubar.^[1]. For other uses, see FUBAR (disambiguation). ... GI or G.I. is a term describing a member of the US armed forces or an item of their equipment. ... The DEC logo Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering American company in the computer industry. ... Foo is a metasyntactic variable used heavily in computer science to represent concepts abstractly and can be used to represent any part of a complicated system or idea including the data, variables, functions, and commands just to name a few. ... The Jargon File is a glossary of hacker slang. ...

Other uses

• In RFC 1639, “FOOBAR” was made an abbreviation for “FTP Operation Over Big Address Records”, a backronym.

A backronym (or bacronym) is a phrase that is constructed after the fact from a previously existing abbreviation, the abbreviation being an initialism or an acronym. ...

Examples

The Term Foobar or Foo and Bar separately are very often used in programming examples, much like the Hello World program is commonly used as an introduction. A hello world program is a computer program that prints out Hello, world! on a display device. ...

Here is an example of how foo and bar might be used to illustrate a simple string concatenation:

 // PHP code $foo = 'Hello'; $bar = 'World'; $foobar = $foo . ' ' . $bar; // $foobar now contains the string "Hello World"  

 // C code void foo() { bar(); } void bar() { foo(); } // Neither foo() nor bar() accomplish anything useful, // and the use of either will lead to a stack overflow error void foobar() { foo(); bar(); }  

For other uses, see PHP (disambiguation). ... C is a general-purpose, block structured, procedural, imperative computer programming language developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system. ... A stack overflow occurs when too many functions are called in a computer program. ...

See also

• Placeholder name
• bar
• foo
• Lorem ipsum

Placeholder names are words that can refer to objects or people whose names are either irrelevant or unknown in the context in which it is being discussed. ... Bar is a metasyntactic variable used heavily in computer science to represent concepts abstractly and can be used to represent any part of a complicated system or idea including the data, variables, functions, and commands just to name a few. ... Foo is a metasyntactic variable used heavily in computer science to represent concepts abstractly and can be used to represent any part of a complicated system or idea including the data, variables, functions, and commands just to name a few. ... Using lorem ipsum to focus attention on graphic elements in a website design proposal. ...

Sources

1. ^ The Jargon File

External links

Look up foobar in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• The Jargon File entry on foobar
• RFC 3092 - Origin and usage of foobar
• RFC 1639 - FTP Operation Over Big Address Records (FOOBAR)