Indeed, this language is math. My friend says that foo is a constant and necessarily not a variable.To All:
Folks, I need your help. I have a friend who claims that if I write:
foo = 5
then foo is NOT a variable, necessarily.
Well, we mostly talk Python here, not math. In Python, if you say foo = 5 foo is a name bound to an immutable value.
If I had written foo = raw_input(), he would
say that foo is a variable.
That's funny. foo is still a name bound to an immutable (string) value. foo is no more or less variable than it was with foo = 5.
Which is perfectly fine except that he
insists that since programming came from math, the concept of variable is necessarily the identical. This can not be true. For example, I may define foo as being a dictionary, but I can not do this within math because there is no concept of dictionaries within mathematics; yet foo is a variable, a name bound to a value which can change.
Sounds like you are having a stupid and meaningless argument with your friend. What you call foo won't change what it is. He should learn Python, then he would understand the true zen of foo.
Kent -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
