Variables

[Richard Blackwood]

Robert Kern wrote:

> 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.
>
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.