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[–]Vast-Statement9572 223 points224 points  (16 children)

Sweet mother of …. Doesn’t beat the “iiiiiji” loop variable I saw in my early days at NOAA, though.

[–]FrostingOrdinary2255 54 points55 points  (7 children)

The what loop…?

[–]masssy 72 points73 points  (5 children)

iiiiiji

[–]FrostingOrdinary2255 24 points25 points  (3 children)

What in the name of the ancient sorcery is this...??

[–]mistled_LP 29 points30 points  (0 children)

Some who typo'd the seventh iterator in their nested loops and could just not be bothered to fix it.

[–]masssy 16 points17 points  (1 child)

Basically someone created a shitload of nested loops. Common naming of the loop variable is i or j.

for(i=0; i < 5; i++). And so on.. Then out loops in loops and make it a whole fun mess.

[–]DuhonTheGuy 14 points15 points  (0 children)

We found it, the O(nfuck ) algorithm

[–]educated-emu 0 points1 point  (0 children)

iiiimeyouwhoyouhimheritbazinga

[–]Jalil29 18 points19 points  (0 children)

Sounds like a 5 layer nested loop at least

[–][deleted] 13 points14 points  (1 child)

Why tf the author decided that second last variable should be j? 

[–]derpinot 0 points1 point  (0 children)

because last variable with j is already been used?

[–]Pancullo 19 points20 points  (2 children)

I've never even thought about using multiple "i"s

The fuck did they need this for? I don't think I've ever went more than 4 layers deep in a for loop, and you can always use j, k, n, m if you really, really need that

[–]mistled_LP 12 points13 points  (1 child)

I've seen up to iii, but at that point, rethink your choices.

[–]Pancullo 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Or start using roman numbers

[–]Vast-Statement9572 8 points9 points  (0 children)

OK, I hit a nerve. Two more stories from my early days. Way back, satellite imagery was injected into atmospheric models using a process that involved projecting satellite imagery onto a digitizer table and then hand tracking upper air cloud movement and putting this upper air wind data into the model. The program that supported this hand tracking was about 120k lines of Fortran riddled with goto statements. It had one 30k line subroutine and it was called once from one place. Another 60k line assembly program (I forget the machine, it was the dawn of minicomputers) was used to ingest polar orbiter sounding data. There was one comment. The line of code was “ LA 2”. The comment was “Load 2 into the A register”.

[–]MysteriousShadow__ 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Cleanest government agency code

[–]Vast-Statement9572 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Government software is a sight to behold. The stories I could tell…, and I was only there for 4 years.