What's the reference? "Learn 2 Proggy in 21 Days"? "The Art of Computer Programming"?
On EL&U, you could reasonably be expected to look in a dictionary, or perhaps even such an exotic source as a thesaurus.
I'd argue it'd be far more useful on Stack Overflow, where a frightening number of questions can be answered simply by digging up the official documentation for the language / API in question and quoting liberally from it... But then again, interpreting official documentation does have some value.
The example you gave seems to be a very simple, basic question... And yet, there are three different answers to it, all with up-votes. Either there's more to the question than meets the eye, or there are a lot of confused programmers out there (my money's on the latter...); either way, there's probably some value in having an answer, here, where it can be vetted and perhaps even improved by the community.