Path: csiph.com!usenet.pasdenom.info!weretis.net!feeder1.news.weretis.net!news.swapon.de!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Gregory Ewing Newsgroups: comp.lang.python Subject: Re: The =?UTF-8?B?77+9ICBkZWJhdGU=?= Date: Fri, 09 May 2014 13:10:41 +1200 Lines: 25 Message-ID: References: <235C4BFA-9770-481A-9FCF-21C3F036769C@gmail.com> <5368681D.8070602@islandtraining.com> <85zjiuea37.fsf_-_@benfinney.id.au> <8738gmxgay.fsf@elektro.pacujo.net> <87tx91warf.fsf@elektro.pacujo.net> <85eh05cdjx.fsf@benfinney.id.au> <87ha50hagu.fsf@elektro.pacujo.net> <8738gkh42a.fsf@elektro.pacujo.net> <8538gkaxr8.fsf@benfinney.id.au> <536c1b2e$0$29965$c3e8da3$5496439d@news.astraweb.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: individual.net 1iWVWp9JuebE8M4jQpnuAAuRRfueyfzvNpVJk4wPdBYzfBoKYN Cancel-Lock: sha1:AOlJeDTW/ODSGD85yAvYxHGOreo= User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.5 (Macintosh/20050711) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en In-Reply-To: <536c1b2e$0$29965$c3e8da3$5496439d@news.astraweb.com> Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.python:71142 Steven D'Aprano wrote: > Today we routinely call horseless carriages > "cars", and nobody would blink if I pointed at a Prius or a Ford Explorer > and said "that's not a carriage, it's a car" except to wonder why on > earth I thought something so obvious needed to be said. That's only because the term "car" *is* well established. The situation with the word "variable" is more like if you pointed at a Prius and said "That's not a car, it's an electric vehicle". Most people would wonder why you refused to categorise it as a type of car. If you look at the way the word "variable" is used across a variety of language communities, the common meaning is more or less "something that can appear on the left hand side of an assignment statement". Nobody seems to complain about using the term "assigment" in relation to Python, despite it meaning something a bit different from what it means in some other languages, so I don't see anything wrong with using the term "variable" with the above definition. -- Greg