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.

A procedure:

• 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 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.

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;
}