Procedures for functional programming

Overview

Teaching: 15 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• How do I write functions?

Objectives

• Be able to write our own procedures.

Similar to other programming languages, Chapel lets you define your own functions. These are called ‘procedures’ in Chapel and have an easy-to-understand syntax:

proc addOne(n) { // n is an.bash parameter
  return n + 1;
}
writeln(addOne(10));

Procedures can be recursive:

proc fibonacci(n: int): int {
  if n <= 1 then return n;
  return fibonacci(n-1) + fibonacci(n-2);
}
writeln(fibonacci(10));

They can take a variable number of parameters:

proc maxOf(x ...?k) { // take a tuple of one type with k elements
  var maximum = x[1];
  for i in 2..k do maximum = if maximum < x[i] then x[i] else maximum;
  return maximum;
}
writeln(maxOf(1, -5, 123, 85, -17, 3));

Procedures can have default parameter values:

proc returnTuple(x: int, y: real = 3.1415926): (int,real) { // 
  return (x,y);
}
writeln(returnTuple(1));
writeln(returnTuple(x=2));
writeln(returnTuple(x=-10, y=10));
writeln(returnTuple(y=-1, x=3)); // the parameters can be named out of order

Chapel procedures have many other useful features, however, they are not essential for learning task and data parallelism, so we refer the interested readers to the official Chapel documentation.

Key Points

• Functions in Chapel are called procedures.

• Procedures can be recursive.

• Procedures can take a variable number of parameters.

• Procedures can have default parameter values.