Robert Kern wrote:
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.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.
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