Section6.4

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## 6.4 Declaring the Type of Functions

In ugTypesDeclare we discussed how to declare a variable to restrict the kind of values that can be assigned to it. In this section we show how to declare a variable that refers to function objects.

A function is an object of type

{\sf Source → Type}

where Source and Target can be any type. A common type for Source is Tuple(, ..., ), usually written (, ..., ), to indicate a function of n arguments.

If g takes an Integer, a Float and another Integer, and returns a String, the declaration is written:

g: (Integer,Float,Integer) -> String
Type: Void

The types need not be written fully; using abbreviations, the above declaration is:

g: (INT,FLOAT,INT) -> STRING
Type: Void

It is possible for a function to take no arguments. If h takes no arguments but returns a Polynomial Integer, any of the following declarations is acceptable.

h: () -> POLY INT
Type: Void
h: () -> Polynomial INT
Type: Void
h: () -> POLY Integer
Type: Void

Functions can also be declared when they are being defined. The syntax for combined declaration/definition is:

functionName(parm 1: parmType 1, ..., parm N: parmType N): functionReturnType

The following definition fragments show how this can be done for the functions g and h above.

g(arg1: INT, arg2: FLOAT, arg3: INT): STRING == ...
h(): POLY INT == ...

A current restriction on function declarations is that they must involve fully specified types (that is, cannot include modes involving explicit or implicit ``?''). For more information on declaring things in general, see ugTypesDeclare .

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