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 -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
