• @fubo@lemmy.world
    72•1 year ago

    Fortran, really.

    In Fortran, variables beginning with the letters i through n have integer type by default, whereas all other letters imply a real-number (floating-point) variable. You can change this by declaring a type, but using i for a real is non-obvious.

    (Hence the old joke, “God is real — unless declared integer.”)

    • Eager EagleEnglish
      32•1 year ago

      idk, this arbitrary i-n range behaving differently than other variables sounds like a terrible source of weird bugs to me. I don’t think variable names should ever change a program’s behavior.

      edit:

      Many old Fortran 77 programs uses these implicit rules, but you should not! The probability of errors in your program grows dramatically if you do not consistently declare your variables.

      source

      • @Successful_Try543@feddit.de
        29•1 year ago

        This comes from early years, when FORTRAN was introduced and the programmers needed to save space in the punch cards. Today, to avoid this possible source of bugs, you usually state “implicit none” in the preamble.