[Tutor] Function design

[Luke Paireepinart]

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 2:08 PM, Eduardo Vieira <eduardo.susan at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hello, I need your help in designing a function. I have created this
> script to check out if certain column in some csv files has value "0":
>
> import csv
>
> def zerofound(csvfile, outputfile, lastcolumn ):
>    """Finds columns with zero prices. Column have 0 index"""
>    final = csv.writer(open(outputfile, 'wb'), dialect='excel')
>
>    reader = csv.reader(open(csvfile, 'rb'), dialect='excel')
>    for row in reader:
>        if '0' in row[:lastcolumn]:
>            final.writerow(row)
>
>
> if __name__ == '__main__':
>    zerofound('pricesfrombv.csv', 'noprices_in_BV.csv', 4)
>    zerofound('excelbv.csv', 'noprices_in_ExcelBV.csv', 6)
>
> My question is. Is it OK to create functions with no "returns"?
> Basically what I did resembles a subroutine, right? How could I
> redesign this to use "return"?
>
Yes, the general "rule of thumb" in Computer Science is that you try to have
functions that either have side-effects or return values, but not both.  In
practice people sometimes have both (eg. try to do some side-effects, if
they work return a 0 and if they don't return an error code) but try to
avoid it if possible.

For example, string.strip() has a return value but no side-effects, because
it does not modify the original string, it returns a new copy of the string
that is stripped.  Whereas list.sort() has no return value (or it returns
None, depending on how you look at it) because it modifies the _ORIGINAL
LIST_ which is a side-effect.

As for your function, try to define the side-effects and change them into a
return value.
An example of a side-effect is printing to the screen or writing to a file,
not just modifying global scoped or input variables.

*************SPOILER*****************
Your side-effect is that you're writing rows to "final".  So you should get
rid of all your "final" code and just return the list of rows.  I would also
suggest renaming the function to find_zeros() and obviously you would pass
just the input filename.  Then you would have another function
write_rows(outfile, rows) and it would output the rows to outfile.  I feel
that would be a much cleaner design.  write_rows probably won't have a
return value since you're writing to a function (side-effect!)
*****************************************

Hope that helps!
-Luke


>
> Thanks for your input,
>
> Eduardo
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