The name foo
is used by computer scientists as a
place holder, to represent the name of any desired object or
function. It is not the name of an actual object or function;
it serves only as an example, to explain a concept.
However, many users misinterpret this convention, and actually
type the command foo
or foo()
. Then they email the
package author to inform them that foo
is not defined.
To avoid this correspondence, we have now defined an object
called foo
.
The function foo()
prints a message explaining that foo
is not really the name of a variable.
The function can be executed simply by typing foo
without parentheses.