As I have this obsession of using natural names, in my books I have used two-word names for index variables. My "rules" are:
- strings and an arrays containing characters
are indexed with character_index
- an array containing references to President objects
is indexed with president_index
- an array containing integers is indexed with
integer_index
- an array containing command line parameters is
indexed with parameter_index
- etc.I admit that finding nice replacements for the traditional i, j, and k is quite hard.
Mr. (Dr.) Kari Laitinen Oulu Institute of Technology, Finland http://www.naturalprogramming.com/
Carl Chilley wrote:
One of the joys of "short names" is that they have a habit of being both cultural and experiential. In terms of i, j, k loop variables I have to blame FORTRAN (in my engineering days) for that one (all vars starting with letters I to n being integers).
On the other hand, when writing Pascal and Modula 2 I resorted to "count", "count-1" etc. as it defined the intent of the variable. Sadly, it did not take me long to go back to FORTRAN habits to use I, j and k (etc.) when the intent of the variable was obvious.
My question is whether i, j and k are still recognised *globally* as viable and therefore known loop counters? If so, are there other examples?
Carl
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of John Sturdy Sent: 4 March 2005 11:39 To: Richard Bartlett Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: PPIG discuss: About natural naming
OTOH, I think that some short names have come to influence what we think of as natural, in particular i j k as loop indices! I think that by now they have become more natural than outer_loop_index middle_loop_index inner_loop_index although I suppose calling something a "loop index" is not fully informative... but taking as an example Warshall's algorithm (all pairs connectivity / shortest paths)
for i = 1 to n for j = 1 to n for k = 1 to n do if (a[i,j] & a[j,k]) then a[i,k] = true;
what would it make sense to call them? In this example case, they could be from_point_number, via_point_number, to_point_number ... but is that how we think of them, or do we think of them as "counting loop indices" ... in which case, perhaps we don't really think of them as variables in the normal sense, but part of a stereotypical syntactical construct?
__John
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