Are routine objects guaranteed mutable & with dictionary?
sturlamolden
sturlamolden at yahoo.no
Sat Dec 5 19:15:13 EST 2009
On 5 Des, 12:55, Andreas Waldenburger <use... at geekmail.INVALID> wrote:
> Can you please elaborate? To me, a function is something that
> transforms some input to some output [1]. Which is exactly what Python
> functions do, without fail.
A mathematical function cannot have side effects. That is what
functional languages strive for. However, without allowing side-
effects, how can you control hardware (printer, file i/o, etc.)?
A Python callable is never a computer science "routine", as it always
returns a value. If no value is explicitely returned, it will silently
return None. All Python callables are functions.
Also in C, calling a void function "routine" is dubious. Fortran and
Basic have a destinction between functions and routines, however.
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