formal parameter vs parameter

formal parameter

noun
  • An abstract representation, typically including a name and a type, of a parameter expected to be passed to a method or function. 

parameter

noun
  • An actual value given to such a formal parameter. 

  • An input variable of a function definition, that gets an actual value (argument) at execution time. 

  • The ratio of the three crystallographic axes which determines the position of any plane. 

  • A characteristic or feature that distinguishes something from others. 

  • A variable that describes some system (material, object, event, etc.) or some aspect thereof. 

  • The fundamental axial ratio for a given species. 

  • A variable of a model that is trained by a machine learning algorithm. 

  • A value kept constant during an experiment, equation, calculation, or similar, but varied over other versions of the experiment, equation, calculation, etc. 

  • Any measured quantity of a statistical population that summarises or describes an aspect of the population. 

  • 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. 

How often have the words formal parameter and parameter occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )