On Sat, 23 Apr 2005 22:45:14 -0400, Richard Blackwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Robert Kern wrote: > >> Richard Blackwood wrote: >> >>> 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. If you guys can define for >>> me what a variable is and what qualifications you have to back you, I >>> can pass this along to, hopefully, convince him that foo is indeed a >>> variable. >> >> >> None of us can do that unless you tell us what he thinks the word >> "variable" means. The terminology is a bit fluid. I suspect that your >> friend applying a somewhat restricted notion of "variable" that >> coincides with the behavior of variables in some other language. >> >Indeed, this language is math. My friend says that foo is a constant and >necessarily not a variable. If I had written foo = raw_input(), he would >say that foo is a variable. 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. Maybe he doesn't know that foo = 5 in Python is not an equation as in math, but a Python source language statement to be translated to a step in some processing sequence. Tell him in Python foo is a member of one set and 5 is a member of another, and foo = 5 expresses the step of putting them into correspondence to define a mapping, not declaring them equal. Even in math notation, ISTM important to distinguish between a finger and what it may for the moment be pointing at. Regards, Bengt Richter -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
