Iota is indeed a Greek letter, the one from which western alphabets inherited
the letter ‘i’ (⍳). If you read Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin
(Darling, 1933) or the New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin (Sihler),
you’ll discover that iota and its friend upsilon share quite a bit of history.
They both come from Phoenician, and they both brought the magic now exhibited
by the modern English ‘Y’ (Υ), of having both consonantal and nonconsonantal
forms.
This was one of the great mysteries from my childhood, where I was taught in
school that the English vowels were A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes, Y. That
baffled me, how Y could be a “sometimes” vowel, as if that made it “less than a
real vowel.” That seemed crazy to me. Certainly Superman was not less of a
superman because he was sometimes Clark Kent. In fact, I tried to recruit
people to my Vowel Movement to get Y classified as a vowel that was sometimes a
consonant, more in keeping with its gravitas from the special vowel role.
Amazingly nobody in my school cared and no teacher could explain the dual
status of ‘Y’.
You can imagine my delight to learn that I and Y came to English from Phoenicia
by way of Greece and in both languages they had this kind of dual
citizenship—but in both they were regarded as vowels with specialness. So the
vowel movement turns out to be historical fact and not just a little boys hope.
Iota’s role in APL as an index generator is also central as the basis of many
vector functions—a typical Go loop on an index variable “for i:=0; I < N;
i++{x[i] = F(y[i])}”is natural in J or APL as “F()” mapped across “iota N.” The
index generator role, “⍳ 5” -> “1 2 3 4 5” is the inspiration for Go’s iota in
blocks of constant declarations. It is very common in C and C++ CPP headers to
see long chains of definitions like:
#define ConditionA 0
#define ConditionB 1
#define ConditionC 2
:
and the Go team (Ken Thompson IIRC) saw that “0 1 2…” and thought of iota. This
was great!
Pronunciation is simply the natural way, if you’re Phoenician or Greek. If not,
have a listen at the Oxford website, which has “real” and Americanized
pronunciations:
https://painfulenglish.wordpress.com/2013/08/03/how-to-pronounce-greek-letters-in-english/
http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/iota
According to the OED, the meaning of iota as “a small or insignificant
quantity” derived from iota being the smallest letter in the Greek alphabet
(i.e., physical orthography.)
P.S. Yes, this is a little bit more detailed than was necessary…but…many of us
are working hard to find joy today.
From: <golang-nuts@googlegroups.com> on behalf of <liyu1...@gmail.com>
Date: Tuesday, November 8, 2016 at 10:04 PM
To: golang-nuts <golang-nuts@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [go-nuts] why "iota"?
I don`t know how to speak 'iota' too,I have to say "i---o---t---a" when I talk
with somebody.
在 2013年4月28日星期日 UTC+8上午8:52:36，mb0写道：
> Wikipedia says it's a greek alphabet that looks like i, and I am seeing
> APL used iota for something like range() in python, which makes
> go-lang's use of iota a bit different from that in APL.
>
> iota sounds cool, and I like it, but I wonder if that coolness was the
> primary reason behind the name of an important language construct, or
> there are some relevant legacy behind the character.
from http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/iota#Noun
... 2. A jot; a very small, inconsiderable quantity.
hope that helps to clarifies it
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