The legacy of FORTRAN

Daniel R. Levy levy at ttrdc.UUCP
Sun Jul 21 10:26:03 AEST 1985


From: mwm at ucbtopaz.CC.Berkeley.ARPA (Mike (I'll be mellow when I'm dead) Meyer)
Message-ID: <1021 at ucbtopaz.CC.Berkeley.ARPA>

>>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.
>
>	<mike
>

I always thought that the reason that Fortran used default i through n to begin
integer variables was from the common use of i through n in mathematics texts
to denote subscripts, which are of course integers; so it would make sense for
C programmers to do the same regardless of the Fortran legacy.  Does that make
any sense?

-Dan-
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