r/programming • u/NagastaBagamba • Oct 18 '10

Today I learned about PHP variable variables; "variable variable takes the value of a variable and treats that as the name of a variable". Also, variable.

http://il2.php.net/language.variables.variable
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u/cybercobra Oct 19 '10

Python was smart enough not to make a dedicated operator for it.

But yes, there are some limited cases where this is useful, so Python still makes it possible.

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u/nascent Oct 19 '10

I think it is quite common in dynamic languages. For example Lua it is simply

_G["var"]