I always use x or y, coming from Python background
Programmer Humor
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I started using the first letter of the thing I am iterating over. This is particularly helpful with nested loops so I can easily remember which index variable corresponds to which thing.
I dunno why, but I have always used x, y, z for my generic for-loop variables.
I thought it come from mathematical sequences, but actually it doesn't. My best bet is that i
is the shorthand for index
When my brain doesn’t work I’ll resort to naming them the single of the plural. Like keys turns into key when i don’t wanna call it “objkey” or “outrageouslylongnamethatmayormaynotbeafittongwordtodescribeakey”
I'm honestly prefer short but (usually) complete words. Somewhere along the line I realized that being explicit really helps when you need to change it later.
chuckles in Python
Well. I guess I'm then a some kind of heretic then. 🤷
don't mind i
but personally always use index
or x, y, z
for games
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.
j
is for a loop in a loop.
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.