想象一个计算图。在这样的图中，我们需要一个输入节点来将数据传递到图中，这些节点应该在tensorflow中定义为占位符。

不要把Python想象成一个通用的程序。你可以写一个Python程序，做所有那些在其他答案中通过变量解释的事情，但对于张量流中的计算图，为了将数据输入到图中，你需要将这些点定义为占位符。

对于TF V1:

常数是有初始值的，在计算中不会发生变化; 变量具有初值，在计算中可以变化;(对于参数来说很好) 占位符没有初始值，在计算中不会改变。(非常适合像预测实例这样的输入)

对于TF V2，同样，但他们试图隐藏占位符(图形模式不是首选)。

区别在于tf。变量，在声明时必须提供初始值。特遣部队。占位符，你不必提供初始值，你可以在运行时在Session.run中使用feed_dict参数指定它

除了其他人的答案，他们在Tensoflow网站上的MNIST教程中也解释得很好:

We describe these interacting operations by manipulating symbolic variables. Let's create one: x = tf.placeholder(tf.float32, [None, 784]), x isn't a specific value. It's a placeholder, a value that we'll input when we ask TensorFlow to run a computation. We want to be able to input any number of MNIST images, each flattened into a 784-dimensional vector. We represent this as a 2-D tensor of floating-point numbers, with a shape [None, 784]. (Here None means that a dimension can be of any length.) We also need the weights and biases for our model. We could imagine treating these like additional inputs, but TensorFlow has an even better way to handle it: Variable. A Variable is a modifiable tensor that lives in TensorFlow's graph of interacting operations. It can be used and even modified by the computation. For machine learning applications, one generally has the model parameters be Variables. W = tf.Variable(tf.zeros([784, 10])) b = tf.Variable(tf.zeros([10])) We create these Variables by giving tf.Variable the initial value of the Variable: in this case, we initialize both W and b as tensors full of zeros. Since we are going to learn W and b, it doesn't matter very much what they initially are.

Tensorflow使用三种类型的容器来存储/执行过程

Constants:Constants保存典型数据。 变量:数据值将被改变，相应的函数，如cost_function.. 占位符:训练/测试数据将被传递到图表中。

在TensorFlow中，变量只是另一个张量(比如tf。常量或tf.placeholder)。碰巧变量可以通过计算来修改。特遣部队。占位符用于将在运行时提供给计算的外部输入(例如训练数据)。特遣部队。变量用于作为计算的一部分并将被计算修改的输入(例如神经网络的权重)。