Comment on How to properly document code?

aluminium@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• TellusChaosovich@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  What is a pure function? Never heard that before.

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  • aluminium@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Essentially a function that doesn’t produce side effects, like modifying variables outside of its scope or modifying the function parameters. This something you should always try to incorporate into your code as it makes it much easier to test and makes the function’s use less risky since you don’t relay on external unrelated values.

    To give you an example in JavaScript, here are two ways to replace certain numbers from an other list of numbers with the number 0

    first a way to do it with a non pure function :

    let bannedNumbers = [4,6] const nums = [0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]

    function replaceWithZero(nums){
        for (let i = 0 ; i < nums.length; i++){
            if (bannedNumbers.includes(nums[i])){
                nums[i] = 0
            }
        }
    }
    replaceWithZero(nums)
    console.log("numbers are : ", nums)
    

    here the function replaceWithZero does two things that make it impure. First it modifies its parameter. This can lead to issues, for example if you have Second it uses a non-constant variable outside of its scope (bannedNumbers). Which is bad because if somewhere else in the code someone changes bannedNumbers the behavior of the function changes.

    A proper pure implementation could look like this :

    const nums = [0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
    function repalceWithZero(nums){
        const  bannedNumbers = [4,6]
        const result = []
        for(const num of nums){
            result.push(bannedNumbers.includes(num) ? 0 : num)
        }
        return result
    }
    const replaced = replaceWithZero(nums)
    console.log("numbers are : ", replaced)
    

    Here we are not modifying anything outside of the function’s scope or its parameters. This means that no matter where, when and how often we call this function it will always behave the same when given the same inputs! This is the whole goal of pure functions.

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    • Miaou@jlai.lu ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I really wouldn’t call anything that hits the network pure, because errors are quite likely. But I guess we all put the bar at a different level, I would not count logging as a side effect yet I’ve been bitten by overly verbose logs in hot loops.

      const-ness gives a mini version of purity, although nothing prevents someone from opening /etc/lol in a const function… I think GCC has a pure attribute but I don’t think it’s enforced by the compiler, only used for optimizations

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