Great Moments in Library Documentation
I present to you the entire documentation for the GObject.chain() function in the PyGTK library:
gobject.GObject.chain
def chain(...)
... : additional parameters
Returns : a Python objectThe chain() method does something.
So, the function takes some unspecified number of parameters, “does something,” and returns something. (Since everything in Python is an object, saying the function returns an object isn’t particularly informative.)
In other words, pretty much any function you could possibly write can be described by the above documentation.
2 Responses
Does Python have a void-equivalent? I thought Python functions always implicitly returned the last computed value, so basically any function which has any statement at all would have to return something (and even with no statement at all wouldn’t it just be ‘false’ which is in turn an object of boolean type?)
Python’s null-equivalent is
None, which is of typeNoneType. There’s no (C-style) void-equivalent, since every statement returns a value (and all values are objects); the closest you can come to returning nothing is to returnNone. Python syntax forbids you from having functions with no statements; thepassstatement (Python’s nop), which does nothing and returnsNone, is typically used for “empty” functions.I suppose a hyperliteral reading of the documentation quoted above would require the function to take any number of arguments, so it’d be prototyped something like
def chain(self, *args), but even then there’s no telling what the function does or what arguments it wants.