On 18/04/15 19:56, PMA wrote: > AFAIK, of our major ancestor languages, only Pascal insisted on a > literal working > function-vs-procedure distinction. Did Wirth ever defend this insistence > (as more > than a track-keeping enforcer re value-outputting vs > non-value-outputting code)?
Actually, so did Fortran, I believe. Note my earlier comment that a function was defined as having a return value with no side effects. That then permits aggressive compiler optimisation - if a function is repeatedly called with the same argument, the compiler can stash the result of the first call away, and replace subsequent calls with a lookup table. (And given that Fortran was meant to be fast and maths-like, that behaviour was actually very sensible ... :-) But because programmers were bad at writing "proper" functions, this caused too many bugs and I think it just became accepted that functions have side effects and such optimisation was not a good idea. Cheers, Wol _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
