Antoon Pardon writes: > Op 25-11-15 om 01:55 schreef Laura Creighton:
>> If I had a time machine, I would go back to early days of Python and >> ban the use of the term 'assignment' and 'value' both. I would >> insist that the term 'binding' be used instead, though if you want to >> use the verb refer, to be synonymous with bind, well, I think that >> would work. (If not, next trip with the time machine, I ban that one >> as well.) Then you make it perfectly clear that what are bound are >> _objects_ not values (or evalues). The object has an evalue, but it >> is the object that is bound. > > Not far enough back. Since there are older languages with the same > assignment semantics as python, you should at least go so far. Back to 1958 or so when Lisp was LISP and the association of names with whatever they named was represented as "association lists" (singly linked lists of key-keyed pairs), or possibly as "property lists" (singly linked lists with alternative elements being the key and the keyed). Other arrangements are known. Such a list would have the role that namespaces have in Python. One could replace the named thing. Then the name would be associated with something else when that same list still served as the namespace. This node (point b) in reminiscenses by John McCarthy himself refers to the "pseudo-functions" rplaca and rplacd that can replace components of these data structures (the "a" and "d" refer to the "address part" and the "decrement part" of a register). <http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/lisp/node4.html> In point d, McCarthy refers to variables as variables; I'm sure this would go back to Church and 1940's at least, so I expect they used this word already back then. But the ability to store new content to the data structure that associates variables with stuff must be newer. I think it was new with LISP. I don't know if assignment was originally called assignment, or whether the association of names with stuff was originally called binding, but this terminology is old enough that I've known binding and assignment of variables by these names for as long as I can remember, with more or less the semantics that Python now uses. "Rebinding" I've not known elsewhere. > Otherwise you would get the argument why one shouldn't use the > word assignment in python, while other languages use it for the > same kind of thing. I think the argument is just that: One shouldn't use otherwise standard terminology in connection with Python. (With the possible exception of the Python language reference.) Because people might be confused. (Other people's confusion doesn't matter. And does the terminology ban even help?) Also, C is different! (Only C matters. Because no reasons.) That became snarky in the end. The trouble is that my mental model and terminology serve me really well when I work in Python. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
