[derleth2]

> If your son (or anyone) understands variables, assignment and adding them together, they fundamentally understand Algebra.

A more important part of algebra is symbol manipulation, and understanding why some manipulations are valid and others are invalid. That symbol manipulation is the core of grade-school (or trivial) algebra. Being able to 'see' how to solve a problem, and being able to abstract general rules to solve whole classes of problems, all flow from that.

Of course, there's a disconnect between using '=' to denote a state of being (the state of equality) and using '=' to denote an action (the action of assignment). As an example, 'x = x + 1' is either trivially nonsense or trivially valid. Haskell actually uses '=' in the mathematical sense, to denote a state of being, and SSA languages such as Erlang come pretty close to it, I think.