Why did people choose "argument" as the term to describe the value of a parameter?
I know the difference between parameter and argument.
Parameter is variable in the declaration of function.
Argument is the actual value of this variable that gets passed to function.
From the dictionary, argument means "a discussion or debate in which a number of people put forward different or opposing opinions".
It's very hard for me to bridge "debate"/disagree to value of parameters (I am not a English native speaker). Are they related? In computer science, why did people choose "argument" as the term to describe the value of parameter?
Related Questions
Argument has been used in that sense as a technical term in English in the fields of astronomy and mathematics for 600 years, and later also in logic and computer science. But as a technical sense, it may well be missing from your L2 dictionary.
You are asking what the relationship is between that sense and the everyday sense of loud disagreement. That is a question about etymology, not computing. Most native English speakers will be unlikely to know the answer, without first consulting a historical dictionary of English. And even then, the big OED doesn't yield a very clear-cut answer.
It is all so very long ago that it is hard to tell.
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