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why not a,b or x,y? (lemm.ee)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
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[–] 17 points 3 years ago (2 children)

It's my understanding that i,j are conventionally used in mathematics which carried over into programming, but specifically it comes from Fortran in which all integer variables start with "I" through "N" based on said mathematical convention

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago*

    In fact this goes all the way back to Hamilton when he invented quaternion, in which i,j,k are used as basis vectors (which are generalizations of the imaginary i). Later Gibbs dropped the scalar component and gave us the modern vector.

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