Re: Recursion, Yo

On 12/04/2024 07:32, Janis Papanagnou wrote:

On 12.04.2024 04:31, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Thu, 11 Apr 2024 15:15:35 GMT, Scott Lurndal wrote:
>

As someone who cut his teeth on
Unix V6, an empty parameter list is less self-documenting than an
explicit (void).

>
Should that apply when calling the function as well?
>
     res = func(void);
>
instead of
>
     res = func();
>
?

 Ideally it would be (without syntactic ballast) just
       res = func;
 (as many programming languages have it designed), in
function definition and function call; no parameters,
no unnecessary parenthesis.
 (Even Algol 68, where I've seen 'void' mentioned for
the first time, does not use 'void' for an empty
function argument list definition or function call.)
 But we use C here, so we have to take what's given.
 

I prefer the consistency of function calls using parenthesis.  The consistent alternative, found in some other languages, is that they never need parenthesis - "foo a b" calls "foo" with parameters "a" and "b".
(Of course you'd need some syntax for referring to the function itself, or its address - "fp = &foo;" would not be too onerous, IMHO.)