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Phrase origin: Why do we "call" functions?

(quuxplusone.github.io)
263 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | 09 Jul 25 04:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.211s | 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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pansa2 ◴[09 Jul 25 04:38 UTC] No.44506396[source]▶
> strange misuses of "call"

My favourite (least favourite?) is using “call” with “return”. On more than one occasion I’ve heard:

“When we call the return keyword, the function ends.”

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jamesfinlayson ◴[09 Jul 25 06:11 UTC] No.44506779[source]▶
I remember someone in university talking about the if function (which ostensibly takes one boolean argument).
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Zambyte ◴[09 Jul 25 13:41 UTC] No.44509940[source]▶
If takes two or three arguments, but never one. The condition is the one made syntactically obvious in most languages, the consequent is another required argument, and the alternative is optional.
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dylan604 ◴[09 Jul 25 14:12 UTC] No.44510291[source]▶
Huh? if (true) {} takes precisely one argument.
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1. andriamanitra ◴[09 Jul 25 21:04 UTC] No.44514732[source]▶
Depends on the language! If "if" wasn't a keyword, in Ruby that would be calling a method that takes one positional argument and one block argument, such as `def if(cond, &body) = cond && body.call`. In PureScript that could be a call to a function with signature `if :: Boolean -> Record () -> _`.

But I assume the comment you were replying to was not referring to the conditional syntax from C-like languages, instead referring to a concept of an if "function", like the `ifelse` function in Julia [1] or the `if` form in Lisps (which shares the syntax of a function/macro call but is actually a special form) [2], neither of which would make sense as one argument function.

[1] https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/base/base/#Base.ifelse

[2] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Co...