Status of side-effecting functions in python

[Rustom Mody]

On Sunday, October 26, 2014 7:11:43 PM UTC+5:30, Dan Sommers wrote:

> At one time, on a huge project, millions of lines of C and assembly
> code, we had a local guideline *not* to write void functions.  The idea
> was to return something that might be useful later, even if it seemed
> unlikely now.  A simple success flag was sufficient; as functions grew,
> often did their failure modes.

Well C and Python are completely different in this respect.
In C it is the norm to return the status in the return value
and the actual return value in pointer parameters.

Or even worse in pointer parameters + globals: think of most of the
system calls and errno.

This low-level messiness is in fact one of the compulsions that
have driven preference and development of higher level languages
like python.  Here failure-mode has dedicated syntax -- exceptions.  This conduces to a more DRY, less error-prone setup.

- Normal mode in the normal functional call-return style
- Failure mode in the except (for caller); raise (for callee) clauses.


Note that my comment was:

> Its generally accepted that side-effecting functions are not a good idea
> -- typically a function that returns something and changes global state. 

So I am not talking of merely global (or non-local) variable
side-effecting functions/methods which is normal in imperative
programming, but ones that do BOTH

- both changing global state
- returning useful results in the return value

While this may be called a code-smell, in C like languages it is
close to unavoidable.

In python its more avoidable and therefore more smelly (to my nose at least!)

Yeah I note Terry's examples of list.pop etc.
I guess one could say that these are instances of practicality beats purity.

However note the context where this thread arose.
A beginning programmer having a hard time distinguishing:

- Values and effects
- Expressions and statements
- Immutable and mutable data-structures
- Functions and Procedures

My claim is that until then, he should not be trying to write code like that.