Elias Mårtenson
You may call me stupid, but I didn't realise until just now that the term subscripting of arrays comes from the mathematical convention of the writing indexes in subscript after the the variable.
I was casually reading some documentation on how to compile Fortran programs on an 1130, as one does, where they mentioned array subscripting and I suddenly realised it. How could I have missed this all this time?
Kartik Agaram
@loke @samebchase Yeah it comes from set-builder notation, which itself has I'm sure crossed over back and forth between English, German and other languages as mathematicians read papers in multiple languages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set-builder_notation
Turning full circle, `for` loops eventually gave rise to Python's notion of list/set/dict comprehensions.
Elias Mårtenson
@samebchase @akkartik the Wikipedia article on the for loop claims the first appearance was in Algol 58. Apparently that in turn came from a really early German language called superplan. I don't think this language was ever implemented.
But the term "for" indicating that a computation is done for all values of the some criteria is quite well established since long, I think.
samebchase
@akkartik @loke
are for loops related to the mathematical "for all" concept?
Kartik Agaram
@loke I'd actually never heard of array subscripts before! Not in the past 10 years, anyway. It's always been indexing to me.
In similar vein, it was a big day when I noticed where for loops came from.
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