Re: [Caml-list] OCaml's variables

[Kristopher Micinski <krismicinski@gmail.com>]

On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 7:30 PM, oliver <oliver@first.in-berlin.de> wrote:
> On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 11:01:39AM +0200, Arnaud Spiwack wrote:
>> Why were you astounded? This is a perfectly legitimate/correct use of the
>> word "variable".
> [...]
>
>
> Do you think so?
>
> I have thought about making the sentence better, but did not found
> a better sentence in short time.
>
> But name-value-binding is the term that is used in functional languages.
> I wonder why the term "variable" pops up there.
> And even I understood the sentence, I'm not sure if this might create confusion
> to some readers, because the term "variable" is normally not used for functional languages.
>
> People new to FP will be said, there are no "variables", and then they maybe
> will be irritated, if they find that term in a reference-manual.
>
> Do you see what I mean?
>
>
> Ciao,
>    Oliver

I agree with everyone else, this is a completely legitimate use of the
word "variable."

As a native english speaker who learned OCaml at a younger age, I
don't think the manual should be changed because a beginner might
confuse the term "variable" with the name of the thing in C.

By the way, when you say:

> People new to FP will be said, there are no "variables", and then they maybe
> will be irritated, if they find that term in a reference-manual.

The person saying this will be incorrect for a number of reasons:
 1. OCaml *does* have mutable values,
 2. The type of FP you emphasize would be more correctly (to
disambiguate from OCaml) as purely functional programming
 3. The term variable doesn't make sense here anyway, in FP there are
tons of variables just as there are in all of mathematics.  What
purely functional programming lacks is a notion of mutable state in
its operational semantics: you can still add them via monads (of
course).

Kris