Why do most of us use 'i' as a loop counter variable?

Posted by kprobst on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by kprobst
Published on 2011-06-24T23:38:27Z Indexed on 2011/06/25 0:31 UTC
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Has anyone thought about why so many of us repeat this same pattern using the same variable names?

for (int i = 0; i < foo; i++) {
    // ...
}

It seems most code I've ever looked at uses i, j, k and so on as iteration variables.

I suppose I picked that up from somewhere, but I wonder why this is so prevalent in software development. Is it something we all picked up from C or something like that?

Just an itch I've had for a while in the back of my head.

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