On Sun, Jul 31, 2016 at 1:51 PM, Random832 <random...@fastmail.com> wrote: > On Sat, Jul 30, 2016, at 22:17, Chris Angelico wrote: >> Yeah. The distinction means you have a fundamental API difference >> between the procedures (which don't return anything) and the functions >> (whose return values you mightn't care about). > > Not really any more than between functions returning different types - > which python doesn't distinguish in general. That some languages may > spell it with a different keyword rather than a special type [such as > C's void] doesn't mean the fundamental API difference is of a different > kind.
In C, you can treat any function as a procedure by simply ignoring its return value, as in Python. So all functions, whether they return int or float or void, are functions - there's no fundamental difference. What I'm talking about is having two types of callables: a = function(x, y) call procedure x, y REXX has this distinction at the call site (because of other API considerations regarding loose expressions), but it's not fundamental; the second form will ignore any return value, ergo a procedure can be upgraded to a function without breaking anything. Python has no distinction whatsoever, requiring all functions to return *something*, even if it's None. Pike has a concept of void functions, but deep in the internals, they just return zero, so if you mess with the type checker and get around the compile-time checks, you'll get zero back. C... I dunno for sure, and it probably depends on the compiler, but I just tried it on my gcc, and it looks like it basically takes whatever happened to be sitting in the accumulator. In all cases, anyone who wasn't expecting a return value will be fine with a version of the function that returns something. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
