Foobar

/ˈfuːbɑːr/ noun

Definition

A placeholder name or dummy variable used in programming and software documentation as a generic example; metasyntactic variable.

Etymology

Origin uncertain; appeared in MIT computing culture in the 1960s-1970s. Likely from military slang 'foo' combined with 'bar,' though the original source remains debated among computer historians.

Kelly Says

Every programmer on Earth has typed 'foobar' at some point—it's so universal that it appears in virtually every programming textbook as the canonical example of meaningless placeholder names.

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