[Swift-user] Returning boolean from a procedure

[Ben Clifford]

On Sat, 3 Mar 2007, Mike Wilde wrote:

> I think this was discussed a while back on the list but I cant find it: Can a
> procedure return a scalar, like Boolean, so that in the following tutorial
> example (q20) we can show the if-condition value coming from a function rather
> than a constant?

not that function and procedure are different in SwiftScript - a procedure 
ends up being a unix invocation, and can only be called in syntax like:

  a = procedure(foo)

rather than being embedded inside an expression, so you can't say 
  a = 3 + procedure()

A function *doesn't* get executed remotely (at present, its something 
happening in the bowels of karajan).

If we had scalar returns from procedures (which we don't), we could say

 b = procedure(foo)
 if(b) { ...} else {...}

but we don't have scalar returns.

I too would like a slightly better example of if() for the tutorial.

> I also cant find where the current language open issues are.  Ben, I though
> you said these were in a bugzila bug but cant find it.

There's a VDL language issues wiki page on the VDL dev wiki - it has some 
fairly obvious name that I can't remember in my transient state. Some of 
the more targeted ones (i.e. ones that think should be fixed in the next 
couple of releases) are in the bugzilla; the wiki page has more rambly 
chatty material that no one has complained about enough to have it made 
into a targetted deliverable.

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