- From: Plechsmíd Martin <Martin.Plechsmid@merlin.cz>
- Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2002 14:44:00 +0200
- To: "'hammond@csc.albany.edu'" <hammond@csc.albany.edu>
- Cc: "'Kamlesh Pandey, Noida'" <kamleshp@noida.hcltech.com>, www-math@w3.org
> Is "assignment" a mathematical concept? It depends what you include in mathematics. > If "declaration" is a mathematical concept, is it something different > from definition? I've never seen a definition of what a declaration is, I only guess what it means from everyday use of this word. But if I was to define declaration, I would distinguish between declaration and assignment by definition. I would say that declaration is usualy treated as a notion from the mathematical meta-language, rather than a mathematical concept - but as I said, this depends on what mathematics consist of. > I've always construed the := operator to mean the object on the left > is being defined as the object on the right, not that I usually see > this notation in mathematics journal literature. Yes, this is fine. But allowing declarations only, not assignments, you cannot do something like sum := 0; for i=0 to 100 do begin sum := sum + i; end; An excelent example is the XSLT language - you can declare variables with a value, but you cannot change the value through the lifetime of the variable. Martin.
Received on Friday, 26 April 2002 08:44:39 UTC