Topic variable
Several programming languages offer syntax shortcuts to deal with the notion of "current" or "topic" variable. A topic variable is basically nothing but some kind of a variable with a very short name which can also often be omitted.
If your language has something similar, show how it can be used by affecting to the topic variable, and then compute its square and square root.
J
With this new definition of topic variables, the closest thing J has to a topic variable is probably dummy variables used in function definitions, because we always omit declaring which variables they are, and because we may omit them entirely. But, we still need to place the function in the context of the value it's being used on.
Thus, for example:
<lang J> example=: *:, %: NB. *: is square, %: is square root
example 3
9 1.73205</lang>
Or course, if it's crucial to the concept of topic variables that they not be constrained to definitions of things like functions, then it might be argued that J does not have them.
Perl
In Perl the topic variable is $_. It is the default argument for many functions, including the square root. It is also the default parameter for loops. The topic parameter is lexical, so its use can be nested into several lexical scopes.
<lang Perl>my $_ = 3; print for $_**2, "\n", sqrt;</lang>
Perl 6
As in previous versions of Perl, in Perl6 the topic variable is $_. In addition to a direct affectation, it can also be set with the 'given' keyword. A method can be called from it with an implicit call:
<lang Perl 6>given 3 {
.say for $_**2, .sqrt;
}</lang>
Standard ML
If an SML expression is evaluated interactively (that is, the fragment of program provided interactively is an expression and not a variable initialization), the value of the expression is used to initialize a variable, it. This is a feature of the interactive shell only.