[Tutor] 'None' output after arbitrary agruments function

[Jeff Shannon]

André Roberge wrote:

> adder doesn't return a value (hence, printing it returns none).

Or, more specifically, all functions return a value; if you don't 
specify what that value should be, it defaults to None.  You (the 
O.P.) have already printed results within the function, and then you 
*also* print whatever's returned from the function; since you haven't 
specified what should be returned, what you get is None, and what 
you're seeing is Python dutifully printing None just as you've told it 
to do. :)

> Try the following (just calling adder, not printing it):
> 
>  def adder(*arg):
>      x = arg[0]
>      for y in arg[1:]:
>          x = x + y
>      print x
> 
> adder('abc', 'def')
> adder(['aa', 'bb', 'cc'], ['dd', 'ee', 'ff'])
> adder(3.23, 1.77, 3.32)

Or, alternatively, since there's any number of things that you might 
want to do with the results of adder(), instead of just printing them...

def adder(*arg):
     x = arg[0]
     for y in arg[1:]:
         x = x + y
     return x

print adder('abc', 'def')
print adder(['aa', 'bb', 'cc'], ['dd', 'ee', 'ff'])

temp = adder(3.23, 1.77, 3.32)
print temp, temp * 2

Note how this lets me do further manipulations on the sum that I get 
from adder(), or simply store the result for later use elsewhere. 
Usually it's considered better style to simply return calculated 
results from a function, rather than printing them there -- the 
exception to this being a function whose sole purpose is to print 
something in a meaningful way.  The idea here is that a function 
should try to do only *one* thing; calculating a result is one thing, 
printing it is a different thing.

Jeff Shannon
Technician/Programmer
Credit International