alexmojaki / alexmojaki/futurecoder

Functions chapter

Open
#93 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
course material
Dominant language
Python
Stars
1.5k
Forks
183
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

Some things to add to the current functions chapter:

- In the page on calling functions from functions, after showing what this looks like in various debuggers, I want to show what it looks like in a traceback. An exception should be raised in the innermost function (e.g. by intentionally misspelling a name) and then explain the resulting traceback.
- Scope and local variables:
- Explain that variables defined in one function are not accessible outside that function
- If they want to access them, they should return them
- However they can access global variables from within a function
- Explain that global and local variables should have different names to avoid errors
- Explain that `return` ends the function call. Sometimes beginners want to return a list of values like this:
```python
def double_nums(nums):
for n in nums:
return n * 2
```
Explain that they must build up a list instead. Maybe hint at generators but don't actually show them.

Things that will only be covered in a later chapter:

- Variadic, named, or optional arguments/parameters
- Higher order functions, functions as objects, functional programming, etc.
- How to set global variables with the `global` statement
- Inner functions and closures

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

Assessment

This issue has not been assessed yet.

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.