Function vs Procedure

[Poseur]

I sometimes see the experts here (and on m.p.excel.programming)
present helper routines as functions rather than procedures thus
assigning a variable in the caller to the function when that
variable is not necessary or used in the caller. Is there an
advantage to that?

 

[Word Heretic]

G'day Poseur <[email protected]>,

Generically speaking, Avoid Void's Wherever possible try to return
a useful value. Sometimes there is just no useful value to return,
sure.

BTW: Stricter languages like C demand you type all returns, so if
there is no useful return you use a datatype of Void which is the
datatype equivalent of NIL:

Steve Hudson - Word Heretic
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Poseur reckoned:

 

[Howard Kaikow]

No.

In general, some folkes argue that every procedure should return a value
that can be used to test for success/failure,

It's a "religious" issue as some programming languages require that all
procedures return a value.
People develop habits depending on they learned to use programming
languages.