foo / bar

programming

The canonical placeholder names in programming examples, used when the specific name does not matter.

"foo" and "bar" are metasyntactic variables: stand-ins that let an example focus on structure rather than naming. Their history is documented in RFC 3092, which traces the pairing to MIT and to the wartime slang FUBAR. When you need a third and fourth, "baz" and "qux" follow.

Also known as: foobar, foo, bar, metasyntactic variable

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