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From: bart <bc@freeuk.com>
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Subject: Re: Recursion, Yo
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2024 10:38:52 +0100
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On 12/04/2024 06:32, Janis Papanagnou wrote:
> On 12.04.2024 04:31, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>> On Thu, 11 Apr 2024 15:15:35 GMT, Scott Lurndal wrote:
>>
>>> As someone who cut his teeth on
>>> Unix V6, an empty parameter list is less self-documenting than an
>>> explicit (void).
>>
>> Should that apply when calling the function as well?
>>
>>      res = func(void);
>>
>> instead of
>>
>>      res = func();

(What happens in Python when 'func' has multiple /optional/ parameters 
which have all been omitted; do you need to document them in the call to 
distinguish this from a call to a function which genuinely has no 
arguments?)

>>
>> ?
> 
> Ideally it would be (without syntactic ballast) just
> 
>       res = func;
> 
> (as many programming languages have it designed), in
> function definition and function call; no parameters,
> no unnecessary parenthesis.

I used to allow 'func' to call a function with no args. Later I switched 
to using func() as being more informative, since just:

    func

doesn't impart very much. Maybe it's a function call; maybe it's a goto 
to label 'func' (as I still allow); maybe it's a macro invocation; maybe 
it's just evaluating a variable 'func' then discarding the value.

Using func() becomes more necessary with dynamic code; if P is a 
reference to a function, then what does this mean:

     Q := P

Is this copying the reference to Q, or calling P() and copying the 
result? Using &P to disambiguate won't work here: that will create a 
reference to the reference!

So F() is really doing CALL F; it's making it explicit.