Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
- adj. Capable of or subject to change or alteration.
- adj. Prone to frequent change; inconstant: mutable weather patterns.
- adj. Tending to undergo genetic mutation: a mutable organism; a mutable gene.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- adj. Changeable; inclined to mutate.
- adj. Having a value that is changeable during program execution.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English
- adj. Capable of alteration; subject to change; changeable in form, qualities, or nature.
- adj. Changeable; inconstant; unsettled; unstable; fickle.
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Capable of being altered in form, qualities, or nature; subject to change; changeable.
- Changeable or inconstant in mind or feelings; unsettled; unstable; liable to change.
- Synonyms Alterable.
- Unsteady, wavering, variable, irresolute, fickle, vacillating.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adj. capable of or tending to change in form or quality or nature
Etymologies
Examples
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Some give this sense of it: "So mutable is even the angelical nature that God would not trust angels with their own integrity; if he had, they would all have done as some did, left their first estate; but he saw it necessary to give them supernatural grace to confirm them."
Commentary on the Whole Bible Volume III (Job to Song of Solomon)
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Not always smoothly — Peirce himself parted ways with his fellow pragmatist William James, largely over the idea that truth was mutable, that is, what is "true" can become not true and even then true again, depending on the situation.
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Your sign is ruled by Mercury and is what's known as a mutable sign - which means changeable.
Holly Cara Price: Weekend Horoscoop* for May 16-27, 2009 ~ sensory overload edition
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Yet news sites and their readers are not accustomed to such "mutable" stories.
Shouting conservative accused of assaulting elderly woman at health care rally
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The 'mutable' in all creatures is the combination of the five primal essences.
The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12
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On the surface, it seemed like a kind of mutable 8-bit string (a feature sometimes requested by users of Python 2).
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Although some programmers might focus on bytearrays as a kind of mutable string, I find their use as an efficient means for assembling messages from fragments to be much more interesting.
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Zeyd, who felt uncomfortable with the idea of mutable avatars - yes, God could do all things, but this raised difficult questions about the soul - suggested, "The great flowerings of civilization on Earth came about when different cultures met, didn't they?
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IMO, the ideal is to default to purely functional (the concept expressed by requiring the "mutable" keyword) and default to static typing (the concept expressed by requiring the "dynamic" keyword.)
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F# has a "mutable" keyword, since nothing is mutable by default.
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