Comment by titanomachy
6 days ago
That's a great question. The first language I learned was python, and "for i in range(10)" makes a lot of sense to me. But "for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)" must have come first, and in that case "for" is a less obvious choice.
BASIC had the FOR-NEXT loop back in 1964.
10 FOR N = 1 TO 10
20 PRINT " ";
30 NEXT N
C language would first release in 1972, that had the three-part `for` with assignment, condition, and increment parts.
This reminds me of a little bit of trivia. In very old versions of BASIC, "FORD=STOP" would be parsed as "FOR D = S TO P".
I found that amusing circa 1975.
In Fortran, it is a do-loop :)
Fortran has grown a lot over time. If somebody said it don’t have a do loop in 196X, I wouldn’t be too surprised.
Really it’s just syntactic sugar, just use a goto.
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FOR comes from ALGOL in which as far as I know is was spelled:
Algol 58 had "for i:=0(1)9". C's for loop is a more general variant.