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Phrase origin: Why do we "call" functions?

(quuxplusone.github.io)
166 points todsacerdoti | 6 comments | 09 Jul 25 04:04 UTC | HN request time: 1.437s | source | bottom
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seabass ◴[09 Jul 25 04:49 UTC] No.44506423[source]▶
I love this sort of cs history. I’m also curious—why do we “throw” an error or “raise” an exception? Why did the for loop use “for” instead of, say, “loop”?
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titanomachy ◴[09 Jul 25 05:02 UTC] No.44506467[source]▶
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.
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1. Dwedit ◴[09 Jul 25 05:11 UTC] No.44506505[source]▶
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.

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2. zabzonk ◴[09 Jul 25 05:18 UTC] No.44506544[source]▶
In Fortran, it is a do-loop :)
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3. bee_rider ◴[09 Jul 25 05:41 UTC] No.44506646[source]▶
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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4. pklausler ◴[09 Jul 25 06:38 UTC] No.44506939{3}[source]▶
The entire point of Fortran was being an effective optimizing compiler for DO loops.
5. kahirsch ◴[09 Jul 25 06:44 UTC] No.44506971[source]▶
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.

6. bregma ◴[09 Jul 25 16:23 UTC] No.44511900{3}[source]▶
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.