* Dennis Lee Bieber:
On Sat, 05 Dec 2009 11:26:34 +0100, "Alf P. Steinbach" <al...@start.no>
declaimed the following in gmane.comp.python.general:
The devolution of terminology has been so severe that now even the Wikipedia
article on this subject confounds the general concept of "routine" with the far
more specialized term "sub-routine", which is just one kind of routine. It is of
Well, if this were a FORTRAN IV text from the mid-70s you'd be
talking about
function subprograms
and
subroutine subprograms
It's in that direction yes, but the distinction that you mention, which is
essentially the same as Pascal 'function' versus 'procedure', or Visual Basic
'function' versus 'sub', is just a distinction of two variants of subroutines.
Up above there is the more general concept of a routine, where there are more
possibilites than just subroutines; Python generators are one example.
As I mentioned earlier, in Eiffel, which is a more modern language than Fortran,
routines are still called routines. And specialized terms include "routine". So
it's not like that language independent terminology has been phased out in
general; it's mostly only in the C syntax family (e.g. Python operators come
mostly from C) that "function" is, misleadingly and with associated severe
constraints, used as a general term.
Cheers,
- Alf
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