One day, you’re browsing through your code, and you notice two big blocks that look almost exactly the same. In fact, they’re exactly the

Can Your Programming Language Do This?

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2024-05-09 19:00:06

One day, you’re browsing through your code, and you notice two big blocks that look almost exactly the same. In fact, they’re exactly the same, except that one block refers to “Spaghetti” and one block refers to “Chocolate Moose.”

OK, it’s a trivial example, but you can imagine a more substantial example. This is better code for many reasons, all of which you’ve heard a million times. Maintainability, Readability, Abstraction = Good!

Now you notice two other blocks of code which look almost the same, except that one of them keeps calling this function called BoomBoom and the other one keeps calling this function called PutInPot. Other than that, the code is pretty much the same.

Now you need a way to pass an argument to the function which itself is a function. This is an important capability, because it increases the chances that you’ll be able to find common code that can be stashed away in a function.

Wait… suppose you haven’t already defined the functions PutInPot or BoomBoom. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just write them inline instead of declaring them elsewhere?