Re: Which code style do you prefer the most?

On 2025-03-06, Richard Heathfield <rjh@cpax.org.uk> wrote:

At school we used a, b, c... for trigonometry and p, q, r for
point co-ordinates, so I suppose I assumed that i, j, k... for
matrices was intended to exploit a nice juicy part of the
alphabet that wasn't being used for anything else...
>
...and then along came imaginary numbers.

The imaginary i happily coexists with the indexing i.

Mathematicians come in two varieties: those who are oblivious
to ambiguity and those who relish it. This i situation goes
unnoticed by the former, and pleases the latter.

Electrical engineers, on the other hand, came along bearing
current, and immediately saw the i clash, renaming the
imaginary i to j.

However, electrical engineers don't count through any abstract spaces,
so they don't care about i (current) clashing with i (indexing).

They count things like resistors (R1, R2, ...), capacitors (C1, C2, ...)
integrated circuits (U1, U2, ...), component pins, and so on.

An EE would never say impractical, goofy things like, "For i from 1
through n (that being the number of capacitors n in my circuit), such
and such a facts holds about Ci ..."

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