what is a variable?

is it a number or a letter?
im a little confused..... please help

A variable is a letter.

Study this site.

http://www.mathsisfun.com/definitions/variable.html

thanks that website really helped.

You're welcome. It's one of my favorite sites.

A variable is a symbolic name that represents a value in a computer program. It can hold any type of data, including numbers, letters, and other types of information. In programming languages, a variable is used to store and manipulate data during the execution of a program.

To understand variables better, let's consider an example. Let's say you want to write a program that calculates the area of a rectangle. You can use variables to store the length and width of the rectangle. In this case, the variables could hold numbers:

```python
length = 5
width = 10
area = length * width
print(area)
```

Here, "length" and "width" are variable names, and 5 and 10 are the values assigned to those variables. The "area" variable is used to store the result of multiplying the length and width.

However, variables are not limited to just numbers. They can also hold letters, strings, boolean values, and more. For example:

```python
name = "John"
age = 25
is_student = True
```

In this case, "name" is a variable that holds a string value ("John"), "age" holds a number (25), and "is_student" holds a boolean value (True).

So, in summary, a variable can represent various types of data, such as numbers, letters, and more, depending on how you define and use it in a program.