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224 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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seabass ◴[] 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 ◴[] 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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Dwedit ◴[] 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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1. kahirsch ◴[] 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.