Discussion on: The big STL Algorithms tutorial: more numeric algorithms

[Pierre Gradot]

The name doesn't help much - at least not me

I was forced to search the reason of such a lame name 😁

From cppreference:

The function is named after the integer function ⍳ from the programming language APL

⍳ is not a glitch. It's a special character, called iota : en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_iota

From Wikipedia:

[APL] uses a large range of special graphic symbols to represent most functions and operators, leading to very concise code

Also from Wikipedia :

The programming language APL is distinctive in being symbolic rather than lexical: its primitives are denoted by symbols, not words. These symbols were originally devised as a mathematical notation to describe algorithms.

[Sandor Dargo]

Thanks, I know that it's a Greek letter, but to be fair, even with all this information I don't find it a descriptive name at all :D

[Pierre Gradot]

I added the link to the latin iota in my previous message, but it seems to be the greek iota indeed. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iota:

In some programming languages (e.g., A+, APL, C++, Go), iota (either as the lowercase symbol ⍳ or the identifier iota) is used to represent and generate an array of consecutive integers. For example, in APL ⍳4 gives 1 2 3 4.

You don't find it descriptive because (I believe) it was not meant to be descriptive but consice...