[DonaldPShimoda]

Oh absolutely, it's one of many such conflations that are common among the majority of real-world programmers. And you're right that a big part of the problem is poorly written (or sometimes just incorrect!) language documentation that doesn't go to the appropriate lengths to explain the distinctions in the terms.

Some other conflations I see frequently in the PL space:

- "argument" vs "parameter"

- "type coercion" vs "type casting"

- "static typing" vs "strong typing"

- "function" vs "method" (and we can throw in "procedure" and "subroutine")