Noun

(Preferans) (en noun)

The selection of one thing or person over others.

The option to so select, and the one selected.

* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-14, author=(Jonathan Freedland)

, volume=189, issue=1, page=18, magazine=(The Guardian Weekly) , title= Obama's once hip brand is now tainted , passage=Where we once sent love letters in a sealed envelope, or stuck photographs of our children in a family album, now such private material is despatched to servers and clouds operated by people we don't know and will never meet. Perhaps we assume that our name, address and search preferences will be viewed by some unseen pair of corporate eyes, probably not human, and don't mind that much.}}

The state of being preferred over others.

A strong liking or personal valuation.

A preferential bias; partiality; discrimination.

Preferans, a card game, principally played in Eastern Europe.

Noun

(en noun)

(mathematics, physics) A variable kept constant during an experiment, calculation or similar.

(programming) An input variable of a procedure definition, that gets an actual value (argument) at execution time (formal parameter) .

Roughly, a tuple of arguments could be thought of as a vector, whereas a tuple of parameters''' could be thought of as a covector (i.e., linear functional). When a function is called, a '''parameter tuple becomes "bound" to an argument tuple, allowing the function instance itself to be computed to yield a return value. This would be roughly analogous to applying a covector to a vector (by taking their dot product (or, rather, matrix-product of row vector and column vector)) to obtain a scalar.

(programming) An actual value given to such a formal parameter (argument or actual parameter) .

A characteristic or feature that distinguishes something from others.

(geometry) In the ellipse and hyperbola, a third proportional to any diameter and its conjugate, or in the parabola, to any abscissa and the corresponding ordinate.

The parameter of the principal axis of a conic section is called the latus rectum.

(crystallography) The ratio of the three crystallographic axes which determines the position of any plane.

(crystallography) The fundamental axial ratio for a given species.