A function is a block of reusable code that performs some action. To get a function to do its job, you “call” it, with some appropriate parameters if the function requires them. The idea is that you do not need to have knowledge about how a function performs its action. You only need to know three things:

These will now be discussed in turn.

Function name

Each function has a name. Like a variable name, a function name may consist of letters, digits, and underscores, and cannot start with a digit. Almost all standard Python functions consist only of lower case letters. Usually a function name expresses concisely what the function does.

When referring to a function, it is convention to use the name, and put an opening and closing parenthesis after the name, as functions are always called in code with such parentheses.

Parameters

Some functions are called with parameters (“arguments”), which may or may not be mandatory. The parameters are placed between the parentheses that follow the function name. If there are multiple parameters, you place commas between them.

The parameters are the values that the user supplies to the function to work with. For instance, the int() function must be called with one parameter, which is the value that the function will try make an integer representation of. The print() function may be called with any number of parameters (even zero), which it will display, after which it will go to a new line.

In general, a function cannot change parameters. For instance, look at the following code:

x = 1.56
print( int( x ) )
print( x )

As you can see when you run this code, the int() function has not changed the actual value of x; it only told the print() function what the integer value of x is. The reason is that, in general, parameters are “passed by value.” This means that the function does not get access to the actual parameters, but it gets copies of the values of the parameters. I say “in general” because not all data types are “passed by value,” but the ones I have discussed until now are. It will be a while before you get to a chapter that introduces data types that can be changed by functions when they are passed as parameters, and I will make abundantly clear how that works when it comes up.

If a function gets multiple parameters, their order matters. For instance, the function pow() gets two parameters, and raises the first to the power of the second.

base = 2
exponent = 3
print( pow( base, exponent ) )

The names of the variables that are used as parameters do not matter, the first is raised to the power of the second. So the following example will give a different outcome than the first, as the same variables are given to the function in a different (rather confusing) order.

base = 2
exponent = 3
print( pow( exponent, base ) ) # confusing use of variables

What happens if you try to call a function with parameters that it cannot work with? For instance, what happens if I call the int() function with a string that does not contain an integer value, or the pow() function with strings instead of numbers? In general, this will lead to runtime errors in your code. For instance, both lines of the code below give a runtime error.

x = pow( 3, "2" )
y = int( "two-and-a-half" )

Return value

A function may or may not “return” a value. If a function returns a value, that value can be used in your code. For instance, the function int() returns an integer representation of the parameter it gets. You can place this return value in a variable, using an assignment, or use it in a different manner, for instance immediately print it. You can even not do anything with it, though there is little reason to call the function in that case.

x = 2.1
y = '3'
z = int( x )
print( z )
print( int( y ) )

As you can see from the example above, you can even use function calls as parameters for a function; e.g., the second call to the print() function in the example gets as parameter a call to the function int(). In this example, the call to the int() function is executed before the print() function is called, as Python first calculates the values for all the parameters before it makes a function call. So the return value of int() is a parameter for print().

Not all functions return a value. For instance, the print() function does not. If you are not careful, this may lead to strange behavior of your program. For instance, examine and run the following code:

print( print( "Hello, world!" ) )

You can see that this code prints two lines, the first containing the text “Hello, world!” and the second containing the word “None.” What is that “None” doing there? To find that out, let’s examine how Python evaluates this statement.

When Python first encounters this statement, it must evaluate print( <something> ). Since <something> is an argument, it starts by evaluating that. <something> is actually print( <something_else> ). Since <something_else> is an argument, it now evaluates that. <something_else> is the string "Hello, world\”!. This is not something that needs to be evaluated, so it calls print() with this string as argument, and “captures” the return value of print() because it needs it as the evaluation of <something>.

Here is the crux: print() has no return value, so there is nothing that Python can use for <something>. For situations such as this, Python has a special value called None. So the first print() gets called with None as argument, and this leads to Python displaying the word “None.”

None is a special value that indicates “no value at all.” If you try to print such a value, Python prints the word “None,” but is not actually printing a string that is "None". It only indicates that there was nothing to print. None is different from, for instance, an empty string (""). An empty string is still a value, namely a string of length zero. None is no string at all, no integer, no float, nothing. So be careful when trying to use a function call; if the function does not actually return a value, weird things may happen.

A function is a black box

Let me stress once more that you may consider a function a “black box”: you do not need to know how the function works or how it is implemented. The name, parameters, and return value are all you need to know. The function might, internally, create variables and do calculations, but they do not have an effect on the rest of your code.

…At least, if the function is implemented well. A function that has no effect on your code is called a “pure function,” and the functions that I discuss here are all “pure functions.” However, sometimes functions are designed that actually do have an effect outside the function, specifically, that the user may provide parameters to that undergo a change. That may be fine, if it is intentional and well-documented. Such functions are called “modifiers.” Modifiers will come up in later chapters.

For now, you can just assume that any function that you use, has no effect on the rest of your code. So calling a function is safe.