Richard Blackwood 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.
Your friend needs to learn, and very quickly if he persists in inflicting his erroneous pedantry on other people, that technical terms have different meanings in different fields, even if one can imagine that one "came from" the other. Hell, even in the same field, it can mean different things. Ask him what "domain" means in mathematics. And check his answer[1].
While one could argue that using the term "variable" for Python names is incorrect for good programming reasons, your friend's reasoning is ridiculous.
[1] http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Domain.html
-- Robert Kern [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"In the fields of hell where the grass grows high Are the graves of dreams allowed to die." -- Richard Harter
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