Procedures

  RainCode is a scripting language. According to this limited ambition, one might be tempted to limit it to the bare necessities, considering that no program in this language should exceed 100 lines of code.

Experience has shown in the past that such limiting assumptions might be badly mistaken, and that programmers find ways of using the language in strange and obscure ways, up to a point where the original intention gets entirely out of sight. Perl   is a nice example of a language that has grown far beyond whatever its original designer might have had in mind at the time.

In any case, RainCode provides a convenient and flexible sub-routine mechanism that can be used to factorize a functionality and reuse it from several different places in a script. This mechanism can also be used to abstract a piece of code in a separate sub-routine, to improve readability and structure, and thereby, ease maintenance.

ProcedureDeclaration ::= 
    PROCEDURE Identifier QFormals
    QLocals 
    BEGIN
    StatementList
    END Identifier ";"

QFormals ::= "(" IdentList ")" |
	     <void>

QLocals ::= VarDeclarations |
	    <void>

RainCode's routines are called procedures. For instance, consider the following example:

PROCEDURE Dump (a);
BEGIN
OUT.WriteLn ("a is : " , a);
END Dump;

The Dump procedure can be called, using the common Pascal-like syntax:

Dump("Hello world");

RainCode performs no type checking on a procedure's argument. It is a true polymorphic language. Executing Dump(79) will display:

a is : 79

on the standard output stream.