Sun Performance and Tuning: Java™ and the Internet, Second Edition

Functions, Procedures, and Programming Notes

SymbEL supports encapsulated, scoped blocks that can return a value. These blocks are referred to as functions and procedures for notational brevity. To complete our picture, we need to make some points about these constructs.

Function Return Types

So far, the only value that functions have returned in the examples has been a scalar type, but functions can return double or string as well. More complex types, covered in later sections, can be returned as well.

Functions cannot return arrays because there is no syntactic accommodation for doing so. However, there is a way to get around this limitation for arrays of nonstructured types. See “Returning an Array of Nonstructured Type from a Function