metasyntactic

It seems that bar was chosen for second metasyntactic name so as to allude to the acronym FUBAR when foo and bar are used together.

On IT regional dialects DC 2008

There are also various regional preferences for metasyntactic names.

On IT regional dialects DC 2008

Noting that hundreds of Internet RFCs "contain the terms ` foo ', ` bar', or ` foobar 'as metasyntactic variables without any proper explanation or definition," this old April Fools RFC examines the roots of Foo, Bar and fubar.

Boing Boing: January 4, 2004 - January 10, 2004 Archives 2004

Hmmmm …. so applying a little metasyntactic language here, does that make fundamentalist Christians anti-anti-theists or anti-atheists?

Armed and Dangerous esr 2010

Expect all those when and if I push it to know that this sort of metasyntactic abstraction is trivial in a Lisp.

Just A Summary : 2009

As an Appendix, we include a table of RFC occurrences of these words as metasyntactic variables.

LXer Linux News 2008

[JARGON] A widely used metasyntactic variable; see foo for etymology.

LXer Linux News 2008

Below is a table of RFC occurrences of these words as metasyntactic variables.

LXer Linux News 2008

Approximately 212 RFCs so far, starting with RFC 269, contain the terms ` foo ', ` bar', or ` foobar 'as metasyntactic variables without any proper explanation or definition.

LXer Linux News 2008

Approximately 212 RFCs, or about 7\% of RFCs issued so far, starting with [RFC269], contain the terms ` foo ', ` bar', or ` foobar 'used as a metasyntactic variable without any proper explanation or definition.

LXer Linux News 2008