The legacy of FORTRAN

Jim Sullivan jims at hcrvax.UUCP
Tue Jul 23 04:24:36 AEST 1985


>>Supposedly this is harder to understand.   In the book "Learning
>>to Program in C" by Thomas Plum he mentions that they looked
>>at a bunch of C code and found out that 90% of C programmers
>>use i and j as index variables.
>
>Which just goes to show that the FORTRAN integer type names will always be
>with us.

Why FORTRAN and not mathematics ?  As I remember my math, i, j, and k are 
generally index variables, a, b, and c are constants; m and n are array
bounds; etc. etc.

The fact the 90% of C programmers use i and j as index variables is not
a particularly stunning fact, it's like saying most programs have at
least one if statement.

Jim



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