🚀 go-pugleaf

[Followup to Alt.Folklore.Computers, please!]

mrs@netcom.COM (Morgan Schweers) writes:

>Greetings,
>    Can someone confirm (preferably in a post, so my MBX doesn't flood)
>the truth/falsity of FORTRAN being the starter of 'I' as a generic loop
>variable?

Fortran is indubitubly the first major highlevel language in which I was
the generic loop index variable, since it was the first major HOL.

'I' was used in this context because it was the traditional index
variable for vectors and matrices in mathematics/physics/etc. before
computers, and thus was used, I'd be sure, in the pseudo-code written
out for the machine-language coders in the pre-fortran Bad Old Days,
just as it was in the give-it-to-a-room-full-of-frieden days and the
dip-pen-and-foolscap days.

The use of 'I' did not arise from fortran declaring it to be integer,
    but rather
Fortran reserved I-N (or was it O?) for integer variables by default
because that approximated existing usage in the domain of 
FORmulae that FORTRAN was to TRANslate into machine-language without
the intervention of programers (who in those days hand-translated
formulae into assembley and thence to ML, unless that step was performed
by a lower assistant, the Coder).
-- 
/s/ Bill Ricker                wdr@wang.wang.com 
"The Freedom of the Press belongs to those who own one."
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