Re: Which code style do you prefer the most?

On 06/03/2025 22:14, Kaz Kylheku wrote:

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.

Yes.

 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.
 

Mathematicians come in two varieties - those that can count, and those that can't count.
In my mathematics, I neither relish ambiguity nor am I oblivious to it - and I think most mathematicians are like that.
It is almost always obvious from context whether "i" refers to the imaginary number constant, or a counter index.  In situations where both might be used (such as the summation for a Fourier series), you simply use a different letter for the index - j, k, and n are typical.

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

I've done plenty of electronics design, though I have no formal education in electrical engineering.  But I think it is quite common to use imaginary "i" rather than "j" - it's usually obvious from the context when you are talking about a current.  It's rare that you only have one current of interest in a system, so you already have i1, i2, i_in, i_out, or whatever.  There is rarely a clash.

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

Of course electrical engineers count loops.

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

And they loop through these things - consider multi-stage filters, transmission line models, etc.

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 ..."
 

They could quite happily talk about the sum of load capacitors C_i on a bus.