What does it mean to call a function in Python

Question

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

User · Accepted Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

when you invoke a function   it is termed  calling  a function    For eg   suppose you ve defined a function that finds the average of two numbers like this-  def avgg a b            return  a b  2    now  to call the function   you do like this     x avgg 4 6  print x   value of x will be 5

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

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