this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Programmer Humor

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[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

WTF, I have never used nor seen "j."

I don't usually have to name these variables these days though. Pretty much everything I use has foreach or some functional programming type stuff.

And like that, the off-by-one mistakes disappear.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

j is for a loop in a loop.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

It was very common in text books when showing nested loops

int nWhatTheCount = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) { 
    for (int j = 0; j < i; j++) { 
        for (int k = 0; k < j; k++) { 
            for (int l = 0; l < k; l++) { // and on, and on
                nWhatTheCount++;
            }
        }
    }
}
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

foreach is useful when you don't need to know the index of something. If you do, conventional i, j, k, etc. are useful.

A lot of it depends what you're doing (number crunching, for instance) or if you're in a limited programming language (why won't BASIC die already?) where parallel arrays are still a thing.