Teach Your Kids To Code: A Parent-friendly Guide to Python Programming

Functions: There’s a Name for That 153

Figure 7-2: The RandomSmileys.py program produces a

happy result.

r turn: e it’s What You Give Back

that counts

We can send information to a function using arguments, but

what if we want to receive information back from a function? For

example, what if we build a function to convert inches to centime-

ters, and we want to store the converted number to use in further

calculations, rather than just printing it directly to the screen? To

pass information from a function back to the rest of our program,

we use a return statement.

Returning a Value from a Function

There are lots of times when we want to get information back from

a function. For example, let’s actually build the function to convert

inches to centimeters and call it convert_in2cm(). We can imagine

the parameter that we might want to accept in the function: a

measurement in inches. But this function is a perfect candidate

for giving information back to the rest of our program—namely,

the converted measurement in centimeters.