It's difficult to be definitive on the universe of programming paradigms. For our purposes, we will distinguish between only two of the many paradigms: functional programming and imperative programming. One important distinguishing feature between these two is the concept of state.
In an imperative language, such as Python, the state of the computation is reflected by the values of the variables in the various namespaces; some kinds of statements make a well-defined change to the state by adding or changing (or even removing) a variable. A language is imperative because each statement is a command, which changes the state in some way.
Our general focus is on the assignment statement and how it changes the state. Python ...
