[racket] [plt-edu-talk] Does a Scheme procedure "return" a value?

From: Shriram Krishnamurthi (sk at cs.brown.edu)
Date: Sat Sep 8 11:36:07 EDT 2012

I concur w/ Joe that there's something to be said for using "returns"
since you're presumably writing documentation that you want
non-Racketeer to read and immediately understand -- your goal here
(presumably) isn't to be pedantic.  This is in contrast to a
programming or programming languages course, where this bit of
pedantry is sort of the point.

Shriram

On Sat, Sep 8, 2012 at 11:33 AM, Joe Marshall <jmarshall at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>
> On Sep 8, 2012 8:19 AM, "Richard Cleis" <rcleis at me.com> wrote:
>>
>> I am writing documentation. What are acceptable words for the following
>> brackets?
>>
>> The function f [what verbs are ok?]
>
> Takes, accepts,
>
>> a name, then [what about here?] a phone number.
>
> Computes, evaluates to, reduces to,
> (Or even "returns", if you don't mind if Ellen and I cringe. We'll know what
> you mean.)
>
>>
>> rac
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sep 8, 2012, at 9:07 AM, Joe Marshall wrote:
>>
>>> A Scheme procedure might return a value, or it might delegate to another
>>> procedure (via tail recursion).  This is a key point: languages without tail
>>> recursion cannot delegate to another procedure. They can do a limited
>>> simulation of delegation by chaining the returns, but this adds an O(n)
>>> space overhead to the computation and consumes stack space, which is a
>>> finite resource (hence the limit).
>>>
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>>
>>
>
>
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