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Call me a noob, 'cause I really am, but what does 'foo' mean? I have seen it a lot. but I don't know what it means. Could someone clarify? All help is appreciated.

Charles
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Flarp
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2 Answers2

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There is an an American military expression, FUBAR, which means "... beyond all recognition". You can figure out what the FU means for yourself. Programmers use the two syllables, foo and bar quite often for throw-away filenames, test programs, etc.

Stephen Rasku
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foo is used as a place-holder name, usually in example code to signify that the object being named, or the choice of name, is not part of the crux of the example. foo is often followed by bar, baz, and even bundy, if more than one such name is needed. Wikipedia calls these names Metasyntactic Variables. Python programmers supposedly use spam, eggs, ham, instead of foo, etc.

There are good uses of foo in SA.

I have also seen foo used when the programmer can't think of a meaningful name (as a substitute for tmp, say), but I consider that to be a misuse of foo.

Edit= Will answered this on another question linked here. I took this from this question: What does 'foo' really mean?

Or you could use the internet slang term in which foo means fool.

Community
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WebSpartan
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    -1, this is a verbatim copy of [this answer from the linked duplicate](http://stackoverflow.com/a/58617/168868). Copying without attribution and proper quoting is *plagiarism*. – Charles Mar 07 '14 at 17:14