In mathematics, and in other disciplines involving formal languages, including mathematical logic and computer science, a variable may be said to be either free or bound. The terms are opposites. A free variable is a notation (symbol) that specifies places in an expression where substitution may take place and is not a parameter of this or any container expression. Some older books use the terms real variable and apparent variable for free variable and bound variable, respectively. The idea is related to a placeholder (a symbol that will later be replaced by some value), or a wildcard character that stands for an unspecified symbol.
In computer programming, the term free variable refers to variables used in a function that are neither local variables nor parameters of that function. The term non-local variable is often a synonym in this context.
An instance of a variable symbol is bound, in contrast, if the value of that variable symbol has been bound to a specific value or range of values in the domain of discourse or universe. This may be achieved through the use of logical quantifiers, variable-binding operators, or an explicit statement of allowed values for the variable (such as, "...where is a positive integer".) A variable symbol overall is bound if at least one occurrence of it is bound.pp.142--143 Since the same variable symbol may appear in multiple places in an expression, some occurrences of the variable symbol may be free while others are bound,p.78 hence "free" and "bound" are at first defined for occurrences and then generalized over all occurrences of said variable symbol in the expression. However it is done, the variable ceases to be an independent variable on which the value of the expression depends, whether that value be a truth value or the numerical result of a calculation, or, more generally, an element of an image set of a function.
While the domain of discourse in many contexts is understood, when an explicit range of values for the bound variable has not been given, it may be necessary to specify the domain in order to properly evaluate the expression.
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Discrete mathematics is a discipline with applications to almost all areas of study. It provides a set of indispensable tools to computer science in particular. This course reviews (familiar) topics a
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In logic, a quantifier is an operator that specifies how many individuals in the domain of discourse satisfy an open formula. For instance, the universal quantifier in the first order formula expresses that everything in the domain satisfies the property denoted by . On the other hand, the existential quantifier in the formula expresses that there exists something in the domain which satisfies that property. A formula where a quantifier takes widest scope is called a quantified formula.
In logic and mathematics, a truth value, sometimes called a logical value, is a value indicating the relation of a proposition to truth, which in classical logic has only two possible values (true or false). In some programming languages, any expression can be evaluated in a context that expects a Boolean data type. Typically (though this varies by programming language) expressions like the number zero, the empty string, empty lists, and null evaluate to false, and strings with content (like "abc"), other numbers, and objects evaluate to true.
In mathematics, a variable (from Latin variabilis, "changeable") is a symbol that represents a mathematical object. A variable may represent a number, a vector, a matrix, a function, the argument of a function, a set, or an element of a set. Algebraic computations with variables as if they were explicit numbers solve a range of problems in a single computation. For example, the quadratic formula solves any quadratic equation by substituting the numeric values of the coefficients of that equation for the variables that represent them in the quadratic formula.
We study the settings where we are given a separable objective function of n variables defined in a given box of integers. We show that in many cases we can replace the given objective function by a new function with a much smaller domain. Our results appl ...
We study the decision problem for the existential fragment of the theory of power structures. We prove complexity results that parallel the decidability results of Feferman-Vaught for the theories of product structures thereby showing that the construction ...
EPFL2023
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Type systems usually characterize the shape of values but not their free variables. However, many desirable safety properties could be guaranteed if one knew the free variables captured by values. We describe CC