An interview with Larry Wall (LinuxVoice)

Posted Jul 24, 2015 12:24 UTC (Fri) by mchapman (subscriber, #66589)
In reply to: An interview with Larry Wall (LinuxVoice) by rsidd
Parent article: An interview with Larry Wall (LinuxVoice)

> You're changing the binding: the new a is different from the old a.

OK, this just sounds like a problem of nomenclature. When I think of "variable", I think of "the symbol typed by the programmer", not "the value to which that symbol is currently referring".

An interview with Larry Wall (LinuxVoice)

Posted Jul 24, 2015 16:00 UTC (Fri) by peter-b (guest, #66996) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, to be perfectly pedantic, there are three things involved here:

1. The symbol
2. The slot bound to the symbol
3. The value stored in the slot

Most programming languages attach type annotations to (2) or (3).

An interview with Larry Wall (LinuxVoice)

Posted Jul 24, 2015 16:15 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

As far as Python is concerned, it is counterproductive to think of variables in terms of “slots” that can have “values” stored in them because that isn't really how the language works. Names in Python are really more like sticky labels attached to objects. If you stick your label on a new object, the type of the previous object you stuck it on doesn't matter, but as long as the label sticks to the same object, the type of that object determines what you get to do with it. Also, objects can have more than one label sticking to them.