> I always thought it was because programmers were too lazy to write a couple of extra characters to make a nice descriptive variable name. Nah. A variable na

> I always thought it was because programmers were too lazy to write a couple of extra characters to make a nice descriptive variable name. Nah. A variable name's descriptiveness (and length) should be proportional to the size of the scope in which it's used. A simple loop index should almost never be longer than i, j, k, etc.