Closures in leu of pointers?

[rusi]

On Sunday, June 30, 2013 12:21:35 AM UTC+5:30, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Sat, 29 Jun 2013 19:02:01 +0200, Antoon Pardon wrote:
> > We might as well say that C doesn't have variables, it has names
> > pointing to memory locations or value containers or something like that.
> > 
> > AFAICS there is no reason why "variable" wouldn't be appropiate for
> > python names as opposed to C names.
> 
> You are absolutely correct in principle. But in practice, there are ten 
> bazillion C, Pascal, COBOL, and BASIC programmers who understand the word 
> "variable" to mean a named memory location, for every Smalltalk or Lisp 
> programmer who understands a "variable" as a name binding. So it's pure 
> weight of numbers thing.

I note that the 10 bazillion C… programmers take precedence over 10 centuries of mathematics. I wonder if you are familiar with Weizenbaum -- early doyen of AI.  Here is a conversation whose first few paras are relevant
http://tech.mit.edu/V105/N16/weisen.16n.html

On a more technical note... that imperative programming is a bad idea is one of the harder-to-learn lessons for computer scientists
http://blog.languager.org/2012/11/imperative-programming-lessons-not.html