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A comment on قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic. Parent comment

Re:قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic by Fordec on Friday October 25, 2019 @04:46AM (#21353044)
Originally it was a Anglicization of "für" in German first used in a programming language called Superplan which was then picked up upon by FORTRAN and then it just stuck
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Re:قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic by dukoid on Friday October 25, 2019 @05:58AM (#21353382)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz_Rutishauser

I don't think it's much more intuitive in German than in English, probably goes back to the "for each" quantor.

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Re:قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic by bhaak on Friday October 25, 2019 @06:37AM (#21353579)
The for loop is the most unintuitive variant of the possible looping constructs. The others (while do/do while/endless loop) are much more straightforward. We could easily have ended up with another version.

I always read it as inspired by "for values of" which at least in German is a common phrase heard in mathematical courses.

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Re:قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic by eru on Friday October 25, 2019 @05:49AM (#21353342)
Well, that doesn't really solve the mystery. The German "für" doesn't have any closer connection with loops than English "for".
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Re:قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic by kuschku on Friday October 25, 2019 @06:30AM (#21353545)
e.g. in Sums or Products, with

$$ Σ_(i=0)^(20) x² $$

you'd actually pronounce that as "summe für i = 0 bis 20 von x²", which is a good argument for where it might be from.

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Re:قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic by eru on Saturday October 26, 2019 @09:11AM (#21363440)
Yes, though isn't that the same when pronouncing math in English? (So it's a good explanation, but doing the detour via German doesn't give us any extra enlightenment?)
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Re:قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic by kuschku on Saturday October 26, 2019 @09:47AM (#21363635)
Well I don't know how it's pronounced in English, so I didn't know that, good to know though:)
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Re:قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written in Arabic by pletnes on Friday October 25, 2019 @06:20AM (#21353497)
Fortran has «do» loops, no «for» loops (to my knowledge). do i = 1, N ...
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