[prog] questions, what is a turing machine

[Meredydd Luff]

On Sunday 29 December 2002 12:50, Jenn Vesperman wrote:
> On Sun, 2002-12-29 at 20:16, Guru - wrote:
> > "If people prefer $foo, great, prefer $foo. ".
> > I'm really confused on what you are talking about, BTW where is 'foo' and
> > 'bar' used?? All GNU/Linux programmers seem to enjoy using the names...
>
> foo, bar, baz and quux are what's called 'metasyntactic variables',
> which is a fancy way of saying we use them to mean any random item.
>
> They're essentially general pronouns, and mean 'thing'.
Mostly (or at least originally), they were used as variable/function/whatever 
names when illustrating a programming point. So I would say, "in C, you do 
foo(&bar); to pass a variable by address". The extension to English is much 
the same idea.

> Variations such as $foo and FOO mean the same thing. (Or rather, the
> same non-thing).
Again, $foo came from using it in exactly the same spirit with Perl or shell, 
where the $ signifies a variable. I'm just guessing, but I think FOO might 
come from languages where variables or constants are by convention in CAPS.

> Where do foo and bar come from? The military term 'fuba'. Fouled Up
> Bloody Awful. Also spelled foobar or fubar. I don't know where baz or
> quux come from.
FUBAR is in fact an alternative acronym - Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition
(for "Fouled", read something cruder at your discretion).

Meredydd
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