On Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 6:29 AM, Stefan Ram <r...@zedat.fu-berlin.de> wrote: > But why do we not have a common and well-known term for > the counterpart, that something does not modify the state > of the world, but that the state of the world does > influence the value (behaviour) of a call such as > »datetime.datetime.now().time()«? > > And this is the intention of my post: Maybe there is such > a term, and I just missed to learn it so far? So, > do you know a term for the phenomenon that can be found > in Python but not in mathematics and consists in the state > of the world influencing the value of an expressions?
The Pike optimizer short-cuts this by flagging such functions as "have side effects". As far as optimizers are concerned, there's not a lot of difference between print() and time(); both of them need to be called every time they're written (unlike, for instance, math.sin(1) which can be called once and then replaced with its result, as it's a pure function). Not sure this helps, but it might indicate why there's no real term for it - "side effects" kinda can be stretched to mean both directions. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
