Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Format is a function in Common Lisp that can produce formatted text using a format string similar to the print format string.It provides more functionality than print, allowing the user to output numbers in various formats (including, for instance: hex, binary, octal, roman numerals, and English), apply certain format specifiers only under certain conditions, iterate over data structures ...
For example, one could define a dictionary having a string "toast" mapped to the integer 42 or vice versa. The keys in a dictionary must be of an immutable Python type, such as an integer or a string, because under the hood they are implemented via a hash function. This makes for much faster lookup times, but requires keys not change.
(Alternatively, a sentinel value like NULL or nullptr may be used to indicate the end of the parameter list.) If fewer arguments are passed in than the function believes, or the types of arguments are incorrect, this could cause it to read into invalid areas of memory and can lead to vulnerabilities like the format string attack.
In object-oriented languages, string functions are often implemented as properties and methods of string objects. In functional and list-based languages a string is represented as a list (of character codes), therefore all list-manipulation procedures could be considered string functions.
Parameters appear in procedure definitions; arguments appear in procedure calls. In the function definition f(x) = x*x the variable x is a parameter; in the function call f(2) the value 2 is the argument of the function. Loosely, a parameter is a type, and an argument is an instance.
A function definition starts with the name of the type of value that it returns or void to indicate that it does not return a value. This is followed by the function name, formal arguments in parentheses, and body lines in braces. In C++, a function declared in a class (as non-static) is called a member function or method.
There are two types of divisions in Python: floor division (or integer division) // and floating-point / division. [103] Python uses the ** operator for exponentiation. Python uses the + operator for string concatenation. Python uses the * operator for duplicating a string a specified number of times.
Integer addition, for example, can be performed as a single machine instruction, and some offer specific instructions to process sequences of characters with a single instruction. [7] But the choice of primitive data type may affect performance, for example it is faster using SIMD operations and data types to operate on an array of floats.