On 12/12/2011 01:38 AM, Pete O'Connell wrote:
Hi I have been writing python code for a while now and I never return anything within any of my functions, I just (eg.) print stuff or make directories or update a log or what have you. When I look at other people's code they are always returning in their functions and I was wondering if someone could give me an example of when I would absolutely have to return something. The thing I don't like about returning is that when I unindent a function and try to run the code to inspect parts of it for debugging I always have to alter the code so as not to get the "return not inside a function error", so I will change the word "return" to "print" and in many cases that's the way I leave it. Anyone have any thoughts on this?
Functions returning a value is much more reusable than functions printing the value directly. For example, if you later decided that you want to store the calculation result in a file or display it in GUI or if you want to reuse the result for further calculation, you do not need to modify the function; you just need to modify the caller. And if you decided to create a GUI for your command line app, you can easily reuse functions returning a value but not when it printed them directly.
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