Sorry to quote all of this -- When I post a one line message to edu-sig, it gets rejected as spam. If this works, of course, this indicates an attack. I wonder how many other one-line questions I have sent to people have been quietly eaten? Does anybody have any recommendations for an editor for children? In the days I was speaking, I used an editor called 'brief' but I don't think they are in business any more. Laura In a message of Mon, 06 Dec 2004 01:24:02 +0100, Gregor Lingl writes:

Laura Creighton schrieb:

This examples shows beautifully that there are different concepts of "function", which also shows up in Python: some are called to return a result - this *shoul d* be independent of global circumstances (variables). (Like mathematical functions mentioned in Nicholas' posting.) The others are functions that *do* something, for instance draw a line (like forward from the turtle graphics module). What forward(50) produces is by no mean s independent of the state of the machine. (And it returns None!) So these are called merely because of their side-effects.

And (regrettably?) there are many functions which do both: produce side-effects and return values (in the real world (especially of students)).

...

And the climax was when I made them fix _each others_ code to make it pr oduce the correct results. I was called 'mean' for that. :-)

By all means, what does 'mean' mean in this context? Gregor

...

Laura

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