Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
I’m not really classically educated in CS or mathematics. I’m just thinking there should be a term for this in pass-by-reference laungauges such as php. IE. functions that return a result (like how you’d want most functions to work) versus functions that modify an in-parameter.
Is there such a term?
The only term that I have heard relating to what you are talking about is: parameter idempotence
Simply put this type of function guarantees that the arguments remain untouched.
As far as a function that changes parameters I haven’t heard any particular terms but I just say: parameter mutating.
From my experience any function that takes a reference to an object, it’s a fairly safe bet that it will be mutating that parameter in some way.