Imperative is not Algebraic

From time to time I've heard the idea repeated that 'imperative programming is algebraic, while "declarative" programming is based on calculus'. Of course, they're probably referring to either lambda calculus in the case of functional programming (which, by the way, is useless to programmers) or predicate calculus in the case of logic programming (which is also pretty useless to programmers XD), but here I want to focus on this little "algebraic" bit of nonsense.

First, for those of you who haven't seen any recently, here's some examples of algebra:

y = 2x + 3

let x = 2 and y = 4 in z = 2x - y

f(x) = x^2 + 4x + 5

In algebra variables are defined in relation to other variables and constants, and may be stated in terms of a function as in "f(x)". Now here's some typical C-style (pseudo)code, demonstrating something that you would never see in an algebra textbook:

int x = 3;
x = x+2;
return x;

Note that here x is being related to itself recursively, which works because in C, x is assumed to be holding some current/previous value (3) and can be assigned a new value based on it (5). Algebra on the other hand has no such concepts of persistence or reassignment. Algebra also has no concept of performing actions, so "return x" is implicit in evaluating 'x' and is not a separate statement. Now compare this to some pure functional ML-style pseudocode:

let f(x) =
   let y = 3
      in
      x + y

Note that I scraped out all the useless lambda-style syntax to make it more readable. Oh, and look it looks like algebra. Almost exactly like algebra in fact, except that you can refer to strings and other non-numerics.  There are some other differences for example side-effects, but those aside functional languages, once you remove the nonsensical syntax, are much more like algebra than imperative languages are, and imperative languages can hardly be called "algebraic" by any standard. To all the CS majors out there who blindly regurgitated this crap in your scientific papers, shame on you, you know who you are.