What does it mean to "call" a function in Python? [closed]

What does "call" mean and do? How would you "call" a function in Python?

Solution 1:

When you "call" a function you are basically just telling the program to execute that function. So if you had a function that added two numbers such as:

def add(a,b):
    return a + b

you would call the function like this:

add(3,5)

which would return 8. You can put any two numbers in the parentheses in this case. You can also call a function like this:

answer = add(4,7)

Which would set the variable answer equal to 11 in this case.

Solution 2:

I'll give a slightly advanced answer. In Python, functions are first-class objects. This means they can be "dynamically created, destroyed, passed to a function, returned as a value, and have all the rights as other variables in the programming language have."

Calling a function/class instance in Python means invoking the __call__ method of that object. For old-style classes, class instances are also callable but only if the object which creates them has a __call__ method. The same applies for new-style classes, except there is no notion of "instance" with new-style classes. Rather they are "types" and "objects".

As quoted from the Python 2 Data Model page, for function objects, class instances(old style classes), and class objects(new-style classes), "x(arg1, arg2, ...) is a shorthand for x.__call__(arg1, arg2, ...)".

Thus whenever you define a function with the shorthand def funcname(parameters): you are really just creating an object with a method __call__ and the shorthand for __call__ is to just name the instance and follow it with parentheses containing the arguments to the call. Because functions are first class objects in Python, they can be created on the fly with dynamic parameters (and thus accept dynamic arguments). This comes into handy with decorator functions/classes which you will read about later.

For now I suggest reading the Official Python Tutorial.

Solution 3:

To "call" means to make a reference in your code to a function that is written elsewhere. This function "call" can be made to the standard Python library (stuff that comes installed with Python), third-party libraries (stuff other people wrote that you want to use), or your own code (stuff you wrote). For example:

#!/usr/env python

import os

def foo():
    return "hello world"

print os.getlogin()
print foo()

I created a function called "foo" and called it later on with that print statement. I imported the standard "os" Python library then I called the "getlogin" function within that library.