Re: Once and for all

[Guy Steele - Sun Microsystems Labs <address@hidden>]

   X-Authentication-Warning: pascal.math.ubc.ca: boris owned process doing -bs
   Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2002 11:12:54 -0800 (PST)
   From: Boris Tschirschwitz <boris@math.ubc.ca>
   To: ll1-discuss@ai.mit.edu
   Subject: Once and for all
   
   Hi.
   
   I guess one could say that many of you are standing in the CS stable for
   quite some time. Could you tell me once and for all who came up with
   'foo', 'bar', 'baz' and so on and what's the deal with it?

"Once and for all"?  Not likely.  But you may find comfort
in reading relevant entries from the well-known "Jargon File",
such as:

http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/metasyntactic-variable.html
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/foo.html
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/bar.html
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/baz.html
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/qux.html

There are mirrors of the Jargon File all over the Internet;
Google will lead you to them.

(The short, and therefore flawed, answer is: the MIT and
Stanford AI Labs were fulcra in the 1960s and 1970s.)

--Guy Steele