Linux Format forums

[Nuke]

Graham Morrison wrote :- " the initial for statement requires a variable which for some reason is nearly always called i in examples"

He is writing a bit tongue in cheek, but of course it stands for "integer".

More specifically the practice comes from Fortran, which was my first programming language. In IBM mainframe Fortran at least, all variables starting with letters between i and n were integers (geddit?) by default, and the rest were floating point. So many coders adopted this convention as a lifetime habit, and i is my own first choice for any counter.
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Unsolved Mysteries of the Universe No 9 :-
Why can't you buy a domestic mailbox that will take an A4 envelope without creasing?

[nelz]

When I learned CS at uni, i stood for index.

That was Algol68, so a lot more modern than Fortran
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Unix is user-friendly. It's just very selective about who it's friends are.

[DavidMcCrossan]

Dear Nuke, you are almost certainly old to been around when there appeared a memorable cartoon in the famous American satirical mag featuring a whimsical representation of a hippy with beard, flares, sandals and guitar been wheeled out of the Courtroom as he declaimed the message ¨ a petty girl, a glass of wine and a charge of Statutory Rape...¨

Best

David

[Nuke]

[towy71]

i stands for interface as in gui
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still looking for that door into summer

[Xelous]

It was never important what i stood for, I've heard it called:

Index
Iterator
Increment
Integer
eye

Its no important that it means anything, but that it is simple in the code to see what is implied by the programmer... and especially to make sure not to use j as the next value somewhere in the code...

At 3am on a coding kicker full of caffeine with the room all stuffy and the dog under the desk farting merrily, trying to decipher:

for (int i = 0; i < imax; i++) {
int jmax = i + 100;
for (int j = i; j < (jmax); j++) {

Is just horrible

[carl_h]

[Bazza]

Hey carl_h...

I always use n for a different reason - (n)umber...

(But yeah, with the speccy I was lazy too... ;o)
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73...

Bazza, G0LCU...

Team AMIGA...

[einonm]

I never use i for variable names, have you ever tried doing a grep for 'i' to find out all the places it's used? You'll end up hitting every 'if' in the file for one thing.

As a consequence I always use 'ii' or 'jj' instead - much easier to search.