Variables

[Mike Meyer]

Richard Blackwood <richardblackwood at cloudthunder.com> writes:
> In any event, he would likely (passionately)
> disagree considering his notion that programming is an off-shoot of
> math and thus at the fundamental level has identical concepts and
> rules.

My formal training is as a mathematician, but my profession is
programmer.

He's right - programming is an offshoot of mathematics. It adds
*dynamics* to the structures of mathematics. In mathematics, a
construct (graph, function, mapping, set, whatever) is immutable. You
can talk about things that change with time, but you do so with a
function f(t) that describes the changes to the thing over time - and
*that* function is immutable. You can say that it isn't time that's
changing, but frobnitz, with the same function describing the change -
and you get the same structures that you got with time.

This change causes a fundamental change in the way practitioners
*look* at objects. Which is visible as a change in the
vocabulary. Yes, you can talk about programming with the vocabulary of
mathematics. But that's like dancing about architecture (*).

             <mike

Original quote "Talking about music is like dancing about
architecture." - attributed to Elvis Costello


-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>			http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.