1) Functions

In Python, a function is a named sequence of statements that belong together. Their primary purpose is to help us organize programs into chunks that match how we think about the solution to the problem.

The syntax for a function definition is:

You can make up any names you want for the functions you create, except that you can’t use a name that is a Python keyword, and the names must follow the rules for legal identifiers that were given previously. The parameters specify what information, if any, you have to provide in order to use the new function. Another way to say this is that the parameters specify what the function needs to do its work.

There can be any number of statements inside the function, but they have to be indented from the def. In the examples in this book, we will use the standard indentation of four spaces. Function definitions are the second of several compound statements we will see, all of which have the same pattern:

We’ve already seen the for loop which follows this pattern.

In a function definition, the keyword in the header is def, which is followed by the name of the function and some parameters enclosed in parentheses. The parameter list may be empty, or it may contain any number of parameters separated from one another by commas. In either case, the parentheses are required.

We need to say a bit more about the parameters. In the definition, the parameter list is more specifically known as the formal parameters. This list of names describes those things that the function will need to receive from the user of the function. When you use a function, you provide values to the formal parameters.

The figure below shows this relationship. A function needs certain information to do its work. These values, often called arguments or actual parameters, are passed to the function by the user.

This type of diagram is often called a black-box diagram because it only states the requirements from the perspective of the user. The user must know the name of the function and what arguments need to be passed. The details of how the function works are hidden inside the “black-box”.

Suppose we’re working with turtles and a common operation we need is to draw squares. It would make sense if we did not have to duplicate all the steps each time we want to make a square. “Draw a square” can be thought of as an abstraction of a number of smaller steps. We will need to provide two pieces of information for the function to do its work: a turtle to do the drawing and a size for the side of the square. We could represent this using the following black-box diagram.

Here is a program containing a function to capture this idea. Give it a try.

Defining a new function does not make the function run. To do that we need a function call. This is also known as a function invocation. We’ve already seen how to call some built-in functions like print,range and int. Function calls contain the name of the function to be executed followed by a list of values, called arguments, which are assigned to the parameters in the function definition. So in the second to the last line of the program, we call the function, and pass alex as the turtle to be manipulated, and 50 as the size of the square we want.

Once we’ve defined a function, we can call it as often as we like and its statements will be executed each time we call it. In this case, we could use it to get one of our turtles to draw a square and then we can move the turtle and have it draw a different square in a different location. Note that we lift the tail so that when alex moves there is no trace. We put the tail back down before drawing the next square. Make sure you can identify both invocations of the drawSquare function.

In the next example, we’ve changed the drawSquare function a little and we get tess to draw 15 squares with some variations. Once the function has been defined, we can call it as many times as we like with whatever actual parameters we like.