In the previous article we had a look at the basics of Functions, now let us look at the various areas within a program’s code or script that a Function would come in handy.
Functions are an essential part of most programming languages. Functions are reusable pieces of code that can be called using a function’s name. Functions can be called anywhere in a Python program, including calling functions within other functions.
Functions provide a couple of benefits:
- Functions allow the same piece of code to run multiple times
- Functions break long programs up into smaller components
- Functions can be shared and used by other programmers
Every function has a function name. The function name is used when the function is called in a program. Calling a function means running a function. Functions can receive input from the program. The input provided to a function is called input arguments or just arguments. Arguments are the code passed to a function as input. Functions can produce output. We say a function returns the output to the program. The output of a function can be assigned to a variable for use in a program. Let us look at the various advantages in applications of functions in Python.
Advantages of using Functions
The following are the main advantages of the use of functions:
- Avoiding code redundancy and ease of maintainability: Functions allows us to reduce the repetition of code blocks or statements which have already been written.
- Make Code Modular: It makes the code much more readable to the average programmer. For example, if we are writing a large program which takes a lot of data from the user and then processes the data to print something out on the screen. We can divide the code into three main stages that is..to take input, to process Data and to produce Output
- Abstraction of code: We can ignore the internal working in functions such as library functions as long as we realize how it should be used effectively.
- Avoiding variable name collisions: Functions allow us to define local level variables, and each different function can utilize existing variable names thus avoiding interruptions for using common variable names or identifiers.
In the next article, we will look at how functions work in python and what is the logic or principle behind how they are able to perform tasks.