more about foo and bar

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

For more information about the Stoverisms “foo” and “bar”, briefly mentioned in the column, check out the links below.

I am a little shocked that, despite the regularity with which “foo” and “bar” are still employed in the computing world, and the longer and much more relevant history that they share with Unix, and Euly would choose to associate them with DOS shareware, and insinuate that “foo” and “bar” are now lost to all but the faded few who can still remember. Is it possible that Euly doesn’t know??

http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/TMRC.html
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/foo.html
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/bar.html
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/foobar.html

soso

2

Soso, welcome to the STRAIGHT DOPE boards, we’re glad to have you here!

When someone starts a topic, we generally like to provide a link to that topic, so that everyone else can be “on the same page.” (Avoids people repeating what’s already in the Staff Report, for instance): What’s the origin of ‘notary sojac’?

3

It wasn’t so much that I didn’t know. It was that the article wasn’t about foo and bar, it was about “notary sojac.” The foo-bar thing probably would have required a whole separate article by itself, and I only really mentioned it because it was tangentially connected to the original question.