(Just my two cents, because in my scanning of this thread so far, I don’t *think* I have seen this…)
Hmm; there are still languages where function and procedure are two syntactically-different things (and subroutine is a useful “overall" term there so you don’t have to always say “procedure or function”). For example, in PL/SQL, a function is a subroutine that returns a value, and a procedure is a subroutine that does not return a value, and their header syntaxes are distinct accordingly. (And I have wondered whether PL/SQL “inherited” that distinction from Ada, but I’ve never been sure about that.) (Of course, PL/SQL actually has three syntactically-distinct kinds of subroutines, as it also has triggers, which are not explicitly called at all, but get invoked before or after a triggering action, and have their own distinct header syntax accordingly… 8 - ) ) So, since the terms aren’t really synonyms, I would hope that Racket documentation would, over time, converge on using them in an agreed-upon way that goes with the history of those terms. (That is, decide in the community about how terms should work with regard to side-effects, and go from there. But, putting on my curmudgeon hat, by gum, functions return something and procedures don’t! 8 - ) ) — Sharon Tuttle -- Sharon M. Tuttle, Professor Department of Computer Science Humboldt State University, Arcata, CA sharon.tut...@humboldt.edu > On Jan 22, 2019, at 5:49 PM, Anthony Carrico <acarr...@memebeam.org> wrote: > > On 1/22/19 6:56 PM, Jon Zeppieri wrote: >> [25 messages] >> >> >> I think Wadler's Law needs an update. > > Long live the internet! > > Op: Should we call them functions or procedures? > A: Functions! > B: Functions! > C: Functions! > D: Functions! > E: But it's a procedural language, and we've called them procedures for > 30 years, so why not call them procedures? > F: Functions don't really exist only procedures! So let's call them > functions! > G: Huh? > H: Wadler's Law > Me: Must... Resist... Being... A... Troll... > > Fail > > -- > Anthony Carrico > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Racket Users" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
