An Introduction to Procedures and Functions

Abstract

It may happen that a particular set of actions has to appear several times in a solution. We may avoid writing out the Pascal statements at every place they are required, by defining them to be a ‘procedure’. A procedure gives a name to a set of actions, which may then be invoked or ‘called’ merely by referring to the name. This has the additional advantage of increased readability, of which more below and in chapter 13. A complete procedure is a declaration which must appear after the var declarations. Its form is as shown in figure 6.1. This is similar to the definition of a program given in chapter 2. A procedure may be considered as a program dedicated to some subtask of the problem, thus simplifying the over-all solution (see section 6.5 and chapter 13).