On Tue, Sep 11, 2018 at 03:47:46AM -0700, ToddAndMargo wrote: : In Perl, what is the proper terminology?
We're not picky, since Perl has never made a hard and fast distinction between routines that return values and routines that don't. You can call them all functions or routines or procedures interchangeably depending on whether you're thinking about their return values or their side effects. Or just call 'em all "subs", that works too. We do tend to distinguish the term "method", but even those are the same thing underneath once they're called. Methods are just routines that were discovered via method dispatch on the first argument rather than the usual function calling method. And there's a little syntactic sugar to let methods treat their first argument specially. But you can take a routine and poke it into a class to turn it into a method, and going the other way, you can pull a method out of a class and call it like a function. So basically, if it's meant to be called with .foo notation, call it a "method", and if it's meant to be called with foo() notation, call it whatever you like. But not "method". :) Larry