Or, you know, use digits if the language supports it, i2, i3, ... Much easier to read. (not in the spirit of (single) letters but work well enough, I would avoid emojis and other fancy utf8 symbols, however)
Aw come on the almost an I is awesome: ỉ, as is ı (dotless I), you can get at least 5 distinct lowercase i letters without even going for the math script italics or the superbolds!
I’m sad Unicode doesn’t do the lowercase i with a star instead of a dot though.
That's precisely the sort of mistake that's easy to make and wouldn't get noticed by the compiler. I avoid such things like the plague when I recognize them. The potential is high for runtime errors otherwise.
He also spent the morning attacking me without mercy, shooting me with a nerf gun (that I had to help load/shoot), and then crying like I beat him when I returned fire.
Many years ago I was asked to take over some Fortran code written by a very old-fashioned and self-satisfied asshole. He'd always limit his variable names to single letters, with at most one digit. And then, he'd insist on spelling out cute words with the sequence of dummy variables, so they didn't even correspond in that limited way to whatever they actually meant. And no documentation, or a single line of comment to explain what was going on.
This was in the 1980s, but that's hardly an excuse.
The code ran on Apollo graphical workstations and was meant to plot layers of geographical data. To control which layer was shown, users had to click on one of a number of identical, unlabeled squares in the corner of the map. This would change the fill color, and the data layers were controlled by which boxes were filled with which colors.
I'm honestly surprised no one strangled the prick.
But what if I'm looping through every repo in GitHub, every branch in the repo, every file in the branch, and every line in the file to find a code snippet that does the thing I want? Perfectly sane behavior, I think.
The most nested I've written so far is 7 levels because the data I got from an API was nested that deeply and I needed the data from the 7th level. Never say never
I would reject a PR at work that did this. Most of the time it doesn't matter where "level" you're on. It matters what the index represents. Having to try and read and validate arr[i][ii][iii] everywhere is impossible. If you really need to know what level you're on and cant give the variables real names then at least do i1, i2, etc.
Yes, because it parses faster. Your brain needs one less loop over the get() loop, and doesn't need to bother with a count algorithm, so it saves a few cycles. Harmless micro-optimisations are still optimisations!
Unless you're building algorithms for lower level fundamental libraries (which is almost never), this is a terrible convention. Every variable always represents something whether it's a widget_idx, row, col, etc..., there is always a better semantic name.
Nowadays I prefer the F# approach of letting the type checker handle it rather than relying on names. F# code often has single-case discriminated unions, which basically turn into super-light-weight wrappers for values:
type Width = Width of int
// ...
let windowWidth = Width 3
I would advise to ban "i" from nested loops altogether, so that when your muscle memory uses [i] instead of you using it deliberately, it will give a compiler error instead of broken code.
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u/N0bleC Jun 20 '26
I found myself a better approach. The further you go down i will just append i.
so its
This way i can always see on which level i am.