For the benefit of others on this forum, FORTRAN is like Basic and no strict, in that you do not have to declare variables. However, variables beginning [I-M] are automatically declared integer, whereas ones beginning with the other letters of the alphabet are automatically real.

This I believe is where your i,j,k and m,n come from. As for s and t, strings were a latecomer to FORTRAN.

Back to the subject of perl, my beliefs are that it should be obvious from looking at the code what your variable is. I don't have an issue with single char loop variables (apart from $a and $b of course), but generally, variables should be given meaningful names. Also, I like using underscores, as I have done much programming in languages and on operating systems without case sensitivity. I have been bitten may times writing code with variables $fooBar, $FooBar and $foobar, whereas $foo_bar wins every time for me.

My first experiences with i,j,and k were in Vector Calculus, not in programming. In a three dimensional space, i relates to the X, j relates to Y, and k relates to Z. I don't know if this was just my textbook's standard, or if others followed this as well.