Comment by dahart
1 day ago
Yes that’s the original spelling & meaning. But using the spellings foobar, foo, bar, and sometimes baz, have been used for decades in programming as examples, temporary names, stand-ins etc. I just assumed that spelling it foo was meant to distance it from the curse word slightly while simultaneously making the pronunciation more clear (i.e. foo not fuh); foo just makes a good nonsense word.
I only just realized the z in foobaz stood for zork
They are called metasyntactic variables and there’s a handful of them for English, but also standard ones in other language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable
> foo not fuh
not to be confused with: fuh not pho