Over the past week I have been picking up C# so that I can better contribute to our front-end automation efforts. Luckily a lot of the Selenium Webdriver syntax is transferable from what I learned and have used with Ruby.

So, today I was going over “program flow” in C# with For Loops and had learned that the reasoning behind using the variable i was historical and that ijkl were the only legal counter variables allowed within FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator) all of those years ago.

for (int i = 5, i < 10; age++)

Pretty cool.

UPDATE: My friend Trevor sent me a link here as this has been brought up a lot in the past. It looks like the reasoning ultimately came from mathematics, specifically the summation notation (i for the first index, j for the second, etc.) and this was used in FORTRAN which became a habit carried over to other languages.

This Pluralsight course needs to update the additional reasoning behind using those counter variables :)