Where does assignment collide?

In law, an assignment is the transfer of a right, interest, or claim from one party, the assignor, to another, the assignee, so that the assignee may enforce it as the assignor once could: a contract right, a lease, a debt, or a patent can each be assigned. Corbin's 1926 article Assignment of Contract Rights set out how such rights pass, when they may be transferred, and what the assignee takes on. The thing named here is a legal act that moves ownership of a right from one person to another, and it has nothing to do with storing a value in a variable, matching workers to jobs, or a task handed to a student.[1]

Unit

One transfer of a right or interest from an assignor to an assignee

Recovery means

An assignment may be revoked or fail, for example for want of required formality, so the right stays with the assignor

Measured by

Identified by the assignment instrument, by notice given to the obligor, and by whether the right was legally capable of transfer

In computer programming, assignment is the operation that stores a value in a variable, binding a name to that value so it can be read and changed later: it is usually written with an assignment operator such as the equals sign, as in x = 3, and it is a fundamental statement of imperative languages. Hoare's 1969 paper An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming gave assignment a formal meaning through an axiom describing how a program's provable properties change when a variable is updated. The thing named here is an operation on program state, not the legal transfer of a right, an optimisation problem, or a piece of schoolwork.[2]

Unit

One store of a value into a named variable

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Read from the program text and its effect on state, and reasoned about with the assignment axiom or by tracing variable values

In operations research, the assignment problem is the combinatorial optimisation task of pairing a set of agents with a set of tasks, one agent to one task, so that the total cost is as small as possible or the total value as large as possible. Kuhn's 1955 paper The Hungarian Method for the Assignment Problem gave an efficient algorithm for solving it, building on ideas from earlier Hungarian mathematicians. The thing named here is a mathematical matching problem over a cost matrix, distinct from the legal transfer of a right, the storing of a value in a variable, or a task set for students.[3]

Unit

One optimal one-to-one matching of agents to tasks over a cost matrix

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Formulated as a cost matrix and solved for the minimum-cost matching, for example by the Hungarian algorithm