On Saturday, May 10, 2014 2:39:31 PM UTC+5:30, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > > Personally, I don't imagine that there ever could be a language where > variables were first class values *exactly* the same as ints, strings, > floats etc. Otherwise, how could you tell the difference between a > function which operated on the variable itself, and one which operated on > the value contained by the value?
Its standard fare in theorem proving languages - see eg twelf: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fp/papers/cade99.pdf where the distinction is made between variables in the meta-language (ie twelf itself) and variables in the the object theory What you mean by *exactly* the same mean, I am not sure... Also I note that I was not meaning first-classness of variables in C in that literal sense. Its just I consider them more first-class than say Pascal but less than say Lisp. [The wikipedia link that Chris posted links to an article that makes the claim that firstclassness is not really defined but can be used in a vague/relative way ] -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
