Returning none

[Gordon McMillan]

C. Laurence Gonsalves wrote:

> Perhaps your programming style is different than mine. I know I've
> frequently run into situations where I've forgotten to actually
> return the result I calculated. Apparently others have as well. I'm
> also sure there is a lot of code that ignores return values. There's
> a way to add checking for this as well...

I won't pretend I've never been bitten by this, or that it's always 
easy to track down. But when I learned Pascal (my 4th language, I 
think), I found the distinction between functions and procedures to 
be very tiresome. A dozen years later when I had to write PL/SQL, I 
had the same reaction. It means that for almost every call I make, I 
have to remember or look up whether it's a function or a procedure. 

I guess I have more sympathy for the functional style, though I find 
the no side-effects restriction extreme. So Python's liberal rules 
(side effects allowed) and consistency (everything returns a result, 
whether desired or meaningful) are, to me, just dandy.

So put me firmly in the camp that favors a stronger PyLint (I just 
recently got bit by a rarely used bare return in some released code).


- Gordon