alt Hacker NewsI do agree these are useful concepts to distinguish, but I don't get the connection to the topic at-hand. To me, there is just the function signature. I don't see a benefit to referring to passed values as distinct from received values. To my ear "argument" and "parameter" are perfect synonyms.
> referring to passed values as distinct from received values.
That’s not the distinction being made by those terms.
“Parameter” refers to a named variable in a function definition.
“Argument” refers to an actual value that’s passed to a function when it’s called.
It’s exactly the same as the distinction between variables and values (which you probably see the use for), just applied to the special cases of function signatures and function calls.
(As an aside, in the lambda calculus this relationship becomes a perfect equivalence: all variables are parameters and all values are arguments.)