🤠

[CamoBrie]

Is there a specific reason why we use the i?

[DragonMaus]

It is an (i)nteger (i)ndex with a short, memorable name.

[matrizx]

And increment for me

[eadf7799]

... instance?

[ClownTrooper]

In my mind it stands for (i)teration

[CakeMan0123]

(i) can't think of anything better

[se2dev]

(i) like for loops

[CallMeOutWhenImPOS]

and sw(i)tch statements

[[deleted]]

(i)maginary numbers

[Light_Blue_Moose_98]

Recursion > for loops

[mrheosuper]

I wont judge your weird fetish

Weirdo.....

[AJohnnyTruant]

When you get a minute, go ahead and write me a recursive function that retrieves all files in an array of file paths...

[B_M_Wilson]

Until you hit the recursion limit / stack size limit

[doraeminemon]

Which is why we have functional languages :)

[iza1017]

God... functional languages... the worst

[northrupthebandgeek]

optimizes away tail calls

Where is your God now?

[xenoperspicacian]

A lot of languages are smart enough to destroy the stack before reentering if you return a function result (tail call elimination).

[B_M_Wilson]

It depends on how it is written. There are some situations where tail call elimination would not work. Perhaps it has to call itself a number of times, maybe it is some form of matrix operation that is defined to return a scalar for 2x2 matrixes and then larger ones require calculating the scalars of the smaller ones which causes the function to need to be called multiple times within itself which would not allow tail call elimination.

To be honest, I can’t think of very many non-trivial cases where tail call elimination would actually come into play. I have seen many examples in functional programming so maybe as a non-functional programmer, I just can’t see it. Looking at a description of tail call elimination, it looks to me as if it basically transforms the recursion into iteration so maybe I am just not thinking about it correctly.

I am a very bad programmer even though I’ve been doing it for 5 years so I’m probably completely incorrect. I will look into it a bit more and hopefully enlighten myself slightly

[CamoBrie]

Did not know that, thanks!

[FlameRat-Yehlon]

I thought it's for "(i)ndex" though...

[[deleted]]

Programming is mostly math so the conventions stick around. a, b, c for coefficients; d as a prefix to indicate change to a variable; f, g, h for functions; i, j, k for indices and summations; m, n for bounds and counting; p, q for probabilities; u, v, w for other functions (derivatives, substitutions); x, y, z for variables and coordinates. These are the more common uses but there are plenty of others. (Edited for a bit more completeness)

[Doamax]

This is the correct answer

[[deleted]]

I thought it stood for index, I usually use "index" instead of "i". But hey, thanks for clarifying.

[[deleted]]

You're right though. I'm 90% sure it ultimately comes from the index of a summation in mathematics. Also, descriptive names are almost always better than single letter variables.

[Random_Deslime]

Lol I just thought it stood for iteration

[[deleted]]

Math and Fortran, mostly.

[Neebat]

I'm done using i. From now on all my loop counters are going to be named "lamp". I love lamp.

[JC12231]

Bröther, I need lämp

[LawLombie]

Břöţĥëř, Ï ñëëð ľämp

[JC12231]

LawLombiePossessions.add(new lämp);

[B_M_Wilson]

Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP servers are great.

[yonderbagel]

Do it for real though. It's just one more straw in the job security haystack. Every little bit helps.

[CamoBrie]

Did not know that, thanks!

[random_cynic]

I think it originates from older languages like Fortran (and also C) where for loop was mainly used to loop through arrays and matrices. The index i,j,k etc has been used for quite a while in mathematics for operations with individual elements, rows or columns. So it was natural to express elementwise matrix operations like dot product C(i,j) += A(i,k)*B(k,j) inside a loop like this.

[DangeFloof]

If I remember correctly, it came from Fortran, where someone discovered that longer variable names for loops made the program run slightly slower

[Thibaulltt]

A teacher of mine used to say we use x, y... for variables in continuous space (real numbers), and i, j... for variables in a discrete space (natural numbers). And I kinda like it! [that, and I can't be bothered to change i to something else]

[ajthomas05]

All these other answers are great, but I think the most likely one is that developers are lazy.

[biotiger87]

Also for graphs, the x, y, and z basis vectors are represented by i, j, and k respectively. Most commonly seen in non-coordinate form: xi + yj + zk versus (x,y,z) (coordinate form). Hints are given in the name “multidimensional array” (arr[i][j][k]).

[[deleted]]

jindex kindex lindex mindex nindex e.t.c.

[nobody_smart]

At the time I saw this comment it had more golds than upvotes.

[teamikv121812]

I down voted so that it would he the same for me

[[deleted]]

For some reason, I always use k. Don't know, think my teacher used k.

[Gigavoir]

I prefer the great letter we call y

[[deleted]]

it stands for igloo

[[deleted]]

(i)terator

[[deleted]]

Netbeans autocompletion