Phrase origin: Why do we "call" functions?

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.

FOR comes from ALGOL in which as far as I know is was spelled:

    for p := x step d until n do

In Fortran, it is a do-loop :)

Algol 58 had "for i:=0(1)9". C's for loop is a more general variant.

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.

The entire point of Fortran was being an effective optimizing compiler for DO loops.

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.

FORTRAN IV, at least the version I used on the PDP-11 running RSX, did not have a DO-loop. Just IF and GO TO. But it did have both logical and arithmetic IF.