Friday, March 9, 2012

The Levels of Foo

I found an article on the web site of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) today which gives the etymology of the word 'foo' and defines the different levels of foo. They are:

foo
bar
baz
qux
quux
corge
grault
garply
waldo
fred
plugh
xyzzy
thud

Now let's see how many levels we can refer to in our example code. Ha


   foo /foo/

   1. interj.  Term of disgust.

   2. Used very generally as a sample name for absolutely anything, esp.
      programs and files (esp. scratch files).

   3. First on the standard list of metasyntactic variables used in
      syntax examples (bar, baz, qux, quux, corge, grault, garply,
      waldo, fred, plugh, xyzzy, thud). [JARGON]

      When used in connection with `bar' it is generally traced to the
      WW II era Army slang acronym FUBAR (`Fucked Up Beyond All
      Repair'), later modified to foobar.  Early versions of the Jargon
      File [JARGON] interpreted this change as a post-war
      bowdlerization, but it now seems more likely that FUBAR was itself
      a derivative of `foo' perhaps influenced by German `furchtbar'
      (terrible) - `foobar' may actually have been the original form.

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3092.txt

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