FOOBAR vs FUBAR

I believe Stuart Levy weighs in on this discussion attributing the introduction of FOO and BAR into the computer lexicon as the standard name place holders used in MIT's computer classes. It was certainly in CS lectures where I was first introduced to the term. My father acknowledged the military version FUBAR as being a "mess" whereas "Tango Uniform" aka TU aka "Tits Up" indicated something was dead (as in "Roger flight, that bogey is Tango Uniform.") For anyone who has taught computer science the utility is clear, you need a non-specific name to indicate a specific instance of a something and FOO is as good as any, the three names used at USC were FOO, BAR, and BLETCH. Some added BLATHER if they needed a fourth. This is similar to the cryptographer's calling the two parties in a secure conversation Alice and Bob. It is so much nicer than A and B. Another feature of FOO was that it was difficult, even for foreign students, to get confused with other english words. Finally, in discussing operating systems and such you need to change suffixes for the same program so you could say "Let's say you had a program FOO, its source code might be in FOO-dot-C and its object code would be compiled to FOO-dot-O, once linked it would be just FOO." pretty easy to talk about something when it has a name/handle. --Chuck