On 2/21/14 9:47 PM, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
On Fri, 21 Feb 2014 09:59:17 -0800, Travis Griggs <travisgri...@gmail.com>
declaimed the following:
On Feb 21, 2014, at 4:13 AM, Ned Batchelder <n...@nedbatchelder.com> wrote:
Man, do I hate this idea that Python has no variables. It has variables (names
associated with values, and the values can change over the course of the
program), they just don't work the same as C or Fortran variables. In fact,
they work exactly the same as Javascript or Ruby variables.
Thank you!
+11
I get tired of the “Python doesn’t have variables” line.
If one is coming from the world where "variable" means "name
identifying a fixed location in memory" then Python does not have
"variables".
BASIC, C, FORTRAN, COBOL, Assembly... A "variable" is synonym for an
address [a box that holds things].
Even Python's mutable types (list, dictionary, for example) do not
follow the "fixed location" metaphor. Each cell in a list merely references
some object, and assignment to that cell changes the reference, not the
object.
So we agree: variables in Python work differently than they do in those
languages.
If one is coming from the world where "variable" means "name bound to a
value", then Python does have "variables".
Javascript, Ruby, Lisp, Perl, PHP, Smalltalk, Lua, Julia... a
"variable" is a name bound to a value.
--
Ned Batchelder, http://nedbatchelder.com
--
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
