Is that where we get it from? I never knew! Apparently you've been
programming even longer than I have!


Rob

"Sylvain Lafontaine" sylvain aei ca (fill the blanks, no spam please)
wrote in message ...
« how long ago did people start using "i" for integer? "For i = " was
one of the first constructs I learned almost 30 years ago. »

For those interested, this old notation came from the first commercial
version of Fortran and had then a functional purpose: all variables
beginning with one of the letters i, j, k, l, m and n (taken from the
enumeration i .. n corresponding to the first two letters of the word
INteger) were automatically declared to be of type integer and all others
were dimensionned as float by default.

In fact, in Fortran 4, I'm not even sure if you could dimension a variable
beginning with one of the letters i .. n to *not* be an integer. (Since
my old manual of Fortran 4 is gone since a very long time, I can't no
longer verify this point.) In Fortran 5, you can easily declare one of
these variables to not be an integer but still, if you don't say
otherwise, they will be of type integer by default.

--
Sylvain Lafontaine, ing.
MVP - Technologies Virtual-PC
E-mail: http://cerbermail.com/?QugbLEWINF