Newsgroup: it.comp.lang.c++
Titolo: FOO ha un significato?

da dove viene?
chi l'ha usato per primo?
un acronimo?
impazzisco se non lo trovo!!!
grazie
--------------------------------
Inviato via 
http://arianna.libero.it/usenet/

 da dove viene?
Dal 'jargon file':
:foo: /foo/ 1. interj. Term of disgust. 2. [very common] Used very 
   generally as a sample name for absolutely anything, esp. programs
   and files (esp. scratch files). 3. First on the standard list of
   {metasyntactic variable}s used in syntax examples. See also {bar},
   {baz}, {qux}, {quux}, {corge}, {grault}, {garply}, {waldo}, {fred},
   {plugh}, {xyzzy}, {thud}.
   When `foo' is used in connection with `bar' it has generally traced
   to the WWII-era Army slang acronym {FUBAR} (`Fucked Up Beyond All
   Repair' or `Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition'), later modified to
   {foobar}.  Early versions of the Jargon File interpreted this
   change as a post-war bowdlerization, but it it now seems more
   likely that FUBAR was itself a derivative of `foo' perhaps
   influenced by German `furchtbar' (terrible) - `foobar' may actually
   have been the _original_ form.
   For, it seems, the word `foo' itself had an immediate prewar
   history in comic strips and cartoons. The earliest documented uses
   were in the "Smokey Stover" comic strip published from about 1930
   to about 1952.  Bill Holman, the author of the strip, filled it
   with odd jokes and personal contrivances, including other nonsense
   phrases such as "Notary Sojac" and "1506 nix nix". The word "foo"
   frequently appeared on license plates of cars, in nonsense sayings
   in the background of some frames (such as "He who foos last foos
   best" or "Many smoke but foo men chew"), and Holman had Smokey say
   "Where there's foo, there's fire".
   According to the Warner Brothers Cartoon Companion
   (
http://www.spumco.com/magazine/eowbcc/
) Holman claimed to have
   found the word "foo" on the bottom of a Chinese figurine. This is
   plausible; Chinese statuettes often have apotropaic inscriptions,
   and this one was almost certainly the Mandarin Chinese word `fu'
   (sometimes transliterated `foo'), which can mean "happiness" or
   "prosperity" when spoken with the rising tone (the lion-dog
   guardians flanking the steps of many Chinese restaurants are
   properly called "fu dogs"). English speakers' reception of Holman's
   `foo' nonsense word was undoubtedly influenced by Yiddish `feh' and
   English `fooey' and `fool'.
   Holman's strip featured a firetruck called the Foomobile that rode
   on two wheels. The comic strip was tremendously popular in the late
   1930s, and legend has it that a manufacturer in Indiana even
   produced an operable version of Holman's Foomobile. According to
   the Encyclopedia of American Comics, `Foo' fever swept the U.S.,
   finding its way into popular songs and generating over 500 `Foo
   Clubs.' The fad left `foo' references embedded in popular culture
   (including a couple of appearances in Warner Brothers cartoons of
   1938-39; notably in Robert Clampett's "Daffy Doc" of 1938, in which
   a very early version of Daffy Duck holds up a sign saying "SILENCE
   IS FOO!") When the fad faded, the origin of "foo" was forgotten.
   One place "foo" is known to have remained live is in the
   U.S. military during the WWII years. In 1944-45, the term `foo
   fighters' was in use by radar operators for the kind of mysterious
   or spurious trace that would later be called a UFO (the older term
   resurfaced in popular American usage in 1995 via the name of one of
   the better grunge-rock bands).  Because informants connected the
   term directly to the Smokey Stover strip, the folk etymology that
   connects it to French "feu" (fire) can be gently dismissed.
   The U.S. and British militaries frequently swapped slang terms
   during the war (see {kluge} and {kludge} for another important
   example) Period sources reported that `FOO' became a semi-legendary
   subject of WWII British-army graffiti more or less equivalent to
   the American Kilroy.  Where British troops went, the graffito "FOO
   was here" or something similar showed up. Several slang
   dictionaries aver that FOO probably came from Forward Observation
   Officer, but this (like the contemporaneous "FUBAR") was probably a
   {backronym} . Forty years later, Paul Dickson's excellent book
   "Words" (Dell, 1982, ISBN 0-440-52260-7) traced "Foo" to an
   unspecified British naval magazine in 1946, quoting as follows:
   "Mr. Foo is a mysterious Second World War product, gifted with
   bitter omniscience and sarcasm."
   Earlier versions of this entry suggested the possibility that
   hacker usage actually sprang from "FOO, Lampoons and Parody", the
   title of a comic book first issued in September 1958, a joint
   project of Charles and Robert Crumb. Though Robert Crumb (then in
   his mid-teens) later became one of the most important and
   influential artists in underground comics, this venture was hardly
   a success; indeed, the brothers later burned most of the existing
   copies in disgust. The title FOO was featured in large letters on
   the front cover. However, very few copies of this comic actually
   circulated, and students of Crumb's `oeuvre' have established that
   this title was a reference to the earlier Smokey Stover comics. The
   Crumbs may also have been influenced by a short-lived Canadian
   parody magazine named `Foo' published in 1951-52.
   An old-time member reports that in the 1959 "Dictionary of the TMRC
   Language", compiled at {TMRC}, there was an entry that went
   something like this:
     FOO: The first syllable of the sacred chant phrase "FOO MANE
     PADME HUM."  Our first obligation is to keep the foo counters
     turning.
 
   (For more about the legendary foo counters, see {TMRC}.) This
   definition used Bill Holman's nonsense word, then only two decades
   old and demonstrably still live in popular culture and slang, to a
   {ha ha only serious} analogy with esoteric Tibetan
   Buddhism. Today's hackers would find it difficult to resist
   elaborating a joke like that, and it is not likely 1959's were any
   less susceptible. Almost the entire staff of what later became the
   MIT AI Lab was involved with TMRC, and the word spread from there.
-- 
Maurizio Loreti                         
http://www.pd.infn.it/~loreti/mlo.html
Dept. of Physics, Univ. of Padova, Italy              ROT13: 
ybe...@cq.vasa.vg

 impazzisco se non lo trovo!!!
Ti si è rotto il browser? Non potevi cercare con Google?
Ci hanno pure scritto un RFC.
 
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3092.html
Max

Max M. wrote:
 > pietro wrote:
 >>da dove viene?
 >>chi l'ha usato per primo?
 >>un acronimo?
 >>impazzisco se non lo trovo!!!
 > Ti si è rotto il browser? Non potevi cercare con Google?
Una ricerca con Google per "foo" rischia di trovare troppo
risultati per essere sfruttabile:-).
Invecci, il jargon file e i RFC son risorse che devono conoscere
tutti. Solo... in qual corso si insegna dove trovare le risorse?
-- 
James Kanze                                 mailto: 
james...@free.fr
Conseils en informatique orientée objet/
                        Beratung in objektorientierter Datenverarbeitung
9 pl. Pierre Sémard, 78210 St.-Cyr-l'École, France 
+33 (0)1 30 23 00 34

 risultati per essere sfruttabile:-).
Beh, nessuno farebbe mai una ricerca specificando "foo" come unica keyword.
Se cerchi "foo meaning" trovi subito l'RFC e anche la pagina di Wikipedia.
Comunque, la cosa migliore era specificare "define:foo".
Max