Odd Errors

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Wed, 01 Oct 2008 22:14:49 +1300, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

> In message
> <1b1ed34d-f386-4389-a7f1-ce68be4e2a14 at k30g2000hse.googlegroups.com>,
> Aaron "Castironpi" Brady wrote:
> 
>> Do you ever want to scream from the rooftops, "'append' operates by
>> side-effect!"?
> 
> No. It's an effect, not a side-effect.

"Side-effect" has the technical meaning in functional languages of any 
change of state that isn't the creation and return of a function result.

People who have been influenced by such functional languages, and many 
Python users are, often use the same meaning. I for one have no 
difficulty understanding from context the difference between "append 
operates by side-effect" and "a function which modifies global variables 
is having side-effects".



-- 
Steven