Word used often as an
identifier by
programmers, especially those who write in
C/
C++ or languages with a similarly brief
syntax like
Perl. The
reason this is so is, to the best of my knowledge,
unknown but one might
speculate that it is for
one or more of the following
reasons:
- Because it's not likely to be the
name of a
variable/
function in an
included library or a
shell command.
- Because you are less likely to
overwrite a
file that you would rather keep (except maybe one of your own
debug files, which is likely to bear a name derived from
said word).
- Because it's almost, but
not quite, a
cuss word.
- Because
C programmers hate to
use meaningful variable names.
Many
coders, however,
consider even "
foobar" to be too long,
opting instead to use each of its halves (
i.e. "
foo" and "
bar") separately. This also gives the programmer an extra identifier to work with, like so:
chomp($foo=`which echo`);
system "$foo Hello World > bar";
The above is, of course, some simple
Perl code which finds the
location (
path) of the "
echo" command, storing the result in a
variable named "
foo." It then proceeds to
echo the phrase "
Hello World,"
redirecting the output to a file named
bar. This
spares the
programmer the
effort of
dreaming up meaningful names (like "$location_of_the_echo_command") for his or her
variables.