Re: Scope of variables

David,
Thanks for the explanation.  I am one of those "rooky" programmers;
self-taught VB, ASP, XSL and so on.  I love listening to this sort of talk,
since I have never formaly been around it.  Its interesting also when people
talk about procedural programming vs. declerative programming.  I don't have
any idea what these are!  What is XSL?  Would XML be considered a language
or just a document (of some sort)?
Karl

>
> > [DAVID] What did you mean by this statement:
> > The "variable value can't change" mantra refers to the fact that there
> > is not an analogue of
> > x=x+1
> > wich some people, corrupted by procedural languages seem to feel
> > is a natural thing to write, whereas it is obviously an affront to the
> > laws of nature, unless x happens to be 0:-)
> > David
>
>
>
> The term variable comes from mathematics and if in mathematics you see
> x=x+1
> then one could deduce (by subtracting x from both sides) that
> 0=1
> which is false, implying the original statement is false.
>
> When I first was shown programming (Fortran at school in the mid 70's)
> this aspect of fortran allowing variables to change their definition
> was the main "strange" thing about programming languages that all the
> books stressed. that programming languages had these strange imperative
> features because they were designed to be easily executed by machines
> rather than easily understood by humans.
>
> A generation later and things have changed: machines are now more
> powerful and so programming languages using more natural declarative
> constructs are now feasible. Let the machine do the work and have the
> language more suitable for humans. But things are not so simple, it
> seems that in the intervening time humans have got used to the
> imperative machine-oriented languages and are now unsettled by human
> oriented declarative languages. You can't win....
>
> David


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