On 2/11/2014 11:19 AM, Travis Griggs wrote:
On Feb 11, 2014, at 7:52 AM, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote:
So in that situation, the no-args call does make sense. Of course,
this is a call to a function that does take args, but it's accepting
all the defaults and providing no additional content. It's quite
different to actually define a function that mandates exactly zero
arguments, and isn't making use of some form of implicit state (eg a
closure, or maybe a module-level function that manipulates
module-level state - random.random() would be an example of the
latter). Syntactically, Python can't tell the difference between
"print()" and "foo()" where foo can never take args.
So at this point, what I’m reading is that actually making a “no arg function”
is difficult, if we widen the semantics.
It is quite easy.
def f(): return 3 # or any other constant.
Chris said that useful functions in Python are (mostly) not really
niladic, which is equivalent to saying that niladic functions in Python
are (mostly) not really useful. They are a mainly a device in pure
function theory to have constants (True, False, 0, 1, ...) while also
having everything be a function (the 'pure' part). Pure set theory uses
its own tricks to make the same constants (and functions) be sets ;-).
--
Terry Jan Reedy
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