> IMHO in a declarative language your example should be an error. You defined x twice. Intentionally or not, this is confusing, for others and for you in a week when you have to look at the code again.

c'mon, this is an example in a forum post ! of course it doesn't make sense in real life. real life is

   distance := computeDistanceToCenterOfScreen(cursorPosition)
   text := "the current distance is: " + distance

but that just muddies the waters needlessly

> Also, why should the second binding override the first? You introduced a temporal dimension where later lines of code somehow override earlier lines of code.

yes, some languages work like that, but it's not the point - either you assume that you can update values in your declarative bindings like that, or you have to define your binding in terms of some external behaviour that will change in magic ways, which again would not be very nice to do as a simple forum post example