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From: ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: About the variable 'I' (was Re: long names (was Readability of Ada))
Message-ID: <5758@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au>
Date: 14 May 91 10:59:52 GMT
References: <12394@dog.ee.lbl.gov> <1991Apr26.034205.27308@netcom.COM> <1991May06.205831.7025@wimsey.bc.ca>
Followup-To: comp.lang.misc
Organization: Comp Sci, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia
Lines: 20

In article <1991May06.205831.7025@wimsey.bc.ca>, atekant@wimsey.bc.ca (Argun Tekant) writes:
> But there was a good reason for FORTRAN to use I & onwards for interegers
> which has nothing to do with mathematics.
> The first computer FORTRAN was implemented on (the name misses me)
> had 16 registers. The first 8 (registers A to H) were real number
> registers the rest (starting from register I) were integer registers.
> You could only have as many variables as your registers, and those were
> named A,B,C,..... .

Hmm.  I thought Fortran became available on the IBM 650.  This description
is false of the 650.  If it was the 709, the description is false of that
machine too.  Certainly the claim that you could have only as many variables
as you had registers is not at all true of the first published description
of Fortran.  Fortran was, after all, designed to _hide_ the hardware.
What's more, didn't Fortran I distinguish floating-point functions by
means of a *trailing* F?
The mnemonic I was taught _may_ have something to do with it:
look at the first two letters of the word "INteger".
-- 
There is no such thing as a balanced ecology; ecosystems are chaotic.