Foobar

From Free net encyclopedia

For other uses, see Foobar (disambiguation).

Foobar is a common placeholder name used in computer programming. It has been described as "the association of two metasyntactic variables: foo and bar". These variables are often used in computer programming examples.

1 Etymology
2 Army acronyms similar to FUBAR
3 See also
4 External links
- 4.1 Foo bar
- 4.2 FUBAR

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Etymology

Most likely, "foo" and "bar" were derived from "foobar," which in turn had its origins in the military slang acronym FUBAR. The most common rendition is "Fucked Up Beyond All Repair" (Several variant renditions exist, with, for example, the words "Fouled", "Any Repair", "Any Redemption", "All Reality", "All Recognition", or "All Reason" used instead of the versions above.)

FUBAR may have had its origins in the German word Furchtbar, meaning frightful, or terrible. It is pronounced with a soft cht, and probably made the transition during World War II. "Foo" had been popularized in American culture, appearing in a 1938 Warner Bros. Daffy Duck cartoon and the comic strip Smokey Stover. Electronics engineers say that snafu and fubar were used before the war by repairmen sent out to repair phone booths. They had to report the situation at arrival to the scene, often on a very bad line, so they developed these acronyms to make themselves understood.

It is also possible that foobar is a phonological interpretation of the first letters of the Runic alphabet. Like Qwerty and Abcde, this expression might have attracted various computer programmers. In a museum at Aarhus, a large wooden bar with the runic enscription f u þ a r, where fu is pronounced like foo. However, the letter þ is actually pronounced like an unvoiced th, not a b (hence the name Futhark for the Runic alphabet).

One of the most popular hacker/demo groups on the Commodore 64 scene in the mid 1980s was FBR - "Fucked Beyond Repair". Except in military and computer science/hacker communities, the word "fubar" had fallen out of use since the 1960s but has enjoyed another resurgence since it was used in the movies Tango and Cash (1989) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). FUBAR is also the title of a 2002 Canadian mockumentary.

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Army acronyms similar to FUBAR

There are a number of slang army acronyms that are similar to FUBAR, all containing the word "fuck". They include:

FUBAR - Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition
SAPFU - Surpasses All Previous Fuck Ups
SNAFU - Situation Normal: All Fucked Up
SUSFU - Situation Unchanged, Still Fucked Up
FUMTU - Fucked Up More Than Usual
FUBB - Fucked Up Beyond Belief
TARFU - Things Are Really Fucked Up
TOFU - Things Ordinary: Fucked Up
GFU - General Fuck Up
SAMFU - Self Adjusting Military Fuck Up
TUIFU - The Ultimate In Fuck Ups
TU - (Tango Uniform) Tits Up/Out of commision
FUGAZI - Fucked Up, Got Ambushed, Zipped In; Refers to out-of-control situation such as a chaotic jungle warfare combat environment
JANFU - Joint Army/Navy Fuck-Up; apparently used by British troops in WWII
JAAFU - Joint Army-Air Force Fuck-Up; the use of JANFU combined with a radical increase in joint-forces operations since 1989, has led to the rare but increasing use of JAAFU
DILLIGAF/DILLIGAS - Do I Look Like I Give A Fuck/Shit? Interrogative form of, "(It) don't mean nothing." Both often heard in Vietnam.
TINS - This Is No Shit! Often seen in veterans' forums
IHTFP - I Hate This Fucking Place. Generally used at MIT and American Service Academies.