variablebinding

Variable binding, sometimes written as variablebinding, is the process by which a name or identifier is associated with a storage location or a value within a program or formal system. In programming languages, binding establishes the mapping between a variable name and its bound entity, which may be a memory cell, a type, or a value carried by the variable. The environment or symbol table of a program or function stores these associations. Binding can occur at different times, called binding time: static binding (also early binding) occurs at compile time, while dynamic binding (late binding) occurs at run time, affecting how names are resolved and how methods or functions are dispatched.

Scope and binding: lexical/static scoping binds names to variables in the region of the program text where they are defined; dynamic scoping binds names according to the call chain. In languages with closures, free variables are captured by a function's environment; lexical binding preserves bindings even when the function is passed elsewhere.

Binding vs assignment: binding is linking a name to a location or value; assignment changes the contents of the bound location. Shadowing and capture: inner scopes may declare a variable of the same name; it shadows outer binding; variable capture occurs in closures if not careful.

In formal logic, variable binding uses quantifiers to bind a variable within a formula; bound variables are not free; free variables occur outside binding. Type binding relates to associating types with variables in statically or dynamically typed languages, including type annotations and type inference. A clear distinction exists between languages with static type binding and those with run-time type binding.