Yesterday, during a very nice presentation by Ohad Kammar at Carnegie Mellon, the discussion got derailed, in part, because of a standard, and completely needless, terminological confusion involving the word “variable”. I’m foolish enough to try to correct it.

The problem is that we’ve all been taught to confuse variables with variables—that is, program variables with mathematical variables. The distinction is basic. Since time immemorial (well, at least since al Khwarizmi) we have had the notion of a variable, properly so-called, which is given meaning by substitution. A variable is an unknown, or indeterminate, quantity that can be replaced by any value of its type (a type being, at least since Russell, the range of significance of a variable). Frege gave the first systematic study of the quantifiers, and Church exploited the crucial concept of a variable to give the most sharply original and broadly applicable model of computation, the -calculus.

Since the dawn of Fortran something that is not a variable has come to be called a variable. A program variable, in the sense of Fortran and every imperative language since, is not given meaning by substitution. Rather, it is given meaning by (at least) two operations associated with it, one to get its contents and one to put new contents into it. (And, maybe, an operation to form a reference to it, as in C or even Algol.) Now as many of you know, I think that the concept of a program variable in this sense is by and large a bad idea, or at any rate not nearly as important as it has been made out to be in conventional (including object-oriented) languages, but that’s an argument for another occasion.

Instead, I’m making a plea. Let’s continue to call variables variables. It’s a perfectly good name, and refers to what is perhaps one of the greatest achievements of the human mind, the fundamental concept of algebra, the variable. But let’s stop calling those other things variables! In my Practical Foundations for Programming Languages I coined (as far as I know) a word that seems perfectly serviceable, namely an assignable. The things called variables in imperative languages should, rather, be called assignables. The word is only a tad longer than variable, and rolls off the tongue just as easily, and has the advantage of being an accurate description of what it really is. What’s not to like?

Why bother? For one thing, some languages have both concepts, a necessity if you want your language to be mathematically civilized (and you do). For another, in the increasingly important world of program verification, the specification formalisms, being mathematical in nature, make use of variables, which most definitely are not assignables! But the real reason to make the distinction is, after all, because words matter. Two different things deserve to have two different names, and it only confuses matters to use the same word for both. This week’s confusion was only one example of many that I have seen over the years.

So, my suggestion: let’s call variables variables, and let’s call those other things assignables. In the fullnesss of time (i.e., once the scourge of imperative programming has been lifted) we may not need the distinction any longer. But until then, why not draw the distinction properly?

Update: remove forward reference.

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