For example, the arity property of a function might be unary or binary. The (???) property of a variable might be discrete or continuous?
2 Answers
Since I didn't recognize the word arity, I looked it up. OED defines it as
The number of elements by virtue of which something is unary, binary, etc.
First citation (emphasis mine):
1968 ...the order of enlargeability and the arity or the order of reducibility of abstract algebras
In light of that I'm inclined to favour an -ability type of word. The first one that came to mind was quantisability - which you probably won't find in any dictionaries (yet! :), but which I would naturally understand as...
quantisability - an attribute defining whether/to what extent something can be quantized
...from...
quantize - to approximate (a signal varying continuously in amplitude) by one whose amplitude is restricted to a prescribed set of discrete values. (Again, emphasis mine)
It's my understanding that if a variable can be quantized, it's digital/discrete. If not, it's continuous.
A variable can only take on one value at a time. Therefore it is neither discrete nor continuous. It just has a value.
X
~ countX
), etc. See Frawley's Linguistic Semantics for available categories, like the ones for Entities, i.e, "nouns".