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Phrase origin: Why do we "call" functions?

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166 points todsacerdoti | 4 comments | 09 Jul 25 04:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.811s | source
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userbinator ◴[09 Jul 25 04:29 UTC] No.44506358[source]▶
Somewhat less frequently, I also hear "invoke" or "execute", which is more verbose but also more generic.

Incidentally, I find strange misuses of "call" ("calling a command", "calling a button") one of the more grating phrases used by ESL CS students.

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1. treyd ◴[09 Jul 25 04:49 UTC] No.44506421[source]▶
I actually see the converse often with novices often, referring to statements (or even entire function decls) as "commands".
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2. kragen ◴[09 Jul 25 05:32 UTC] No.44506617[source]▶
"Command" is a better term for what we call "statements" in imperative programming languages. "Statement" in this context is an unfortunate historical term; except in Prolog, these "statements" don't have a truth-value, just an effect. (And in Prolog we call them "clauses" instead.)
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3. adrian_b ◴[09 Jul 25 14:49 UTC] No.44510711[source]▶
True.

In many early computer programming documents the term "order" was used instead of "statement", where "order" was meant as a synonym for "command" and not as referring to the ordering of a sequence.

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4. kragen ◴[09 Jul 25 15:54 UTC] No.44511605{3}[source]▶
Occasionally, but much more often (as in Mauchly's cited paper) an "order" was a machine instruction, not a high-level language "statement".