Procedures

A procedure is a group of instructions that do something. In your program, you can define your own procedures, allowing you to divide a program’s tasks into separate steps.

Annotated sample code showing a procedure declaration

Is a building block that you can create and use in your code.
Contains code to perform a certain task. When you want the task performed, you call the procedure.
Has a name that is the identifier used to call the procedure.
May have a number of parameters that allow you to pass values to it.
Will have a side effect when it runs. This means that a procedure changes something when it is executed.
Has instructions which are isolated from the other code in your program.
Must be coded within the program - not within other functions or procedures.
Starts with void, then the name of the procedure, and a list of parameters in parentheses. This is followed by the block of code to run when the procedure is called.
Documentation comments should be added to describe the procedure. These start with /** and are placed before the function declaration.

Example

The following shows an example of a say_hello_to procedure, which is called from the main function.

#include "splashkit.h"

/**
* Output a message to say hello to a give user name.
*
* @param name   The name to say hello to
*/
void say_hello_to(string name)
{
    write_line("Hello " + name);
}

int main()
{
    say_hello_to("Bob");
    say_hello_to("Alexis");
    // etc...

    return 0;
}