Parameters are really important for telling procedures and functions apart, especially in programming.
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What are Procedures and Functions?:
- Procedures: These are like steps that do something, but they don’t give you a result back. They usually take in parameters as input.
- Functions: These also do something, but they do return a result. They do this based on the parameters you give them.
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How Parameters Work:
- In Procedures: Parameters let you provide different pieces of information. This means you can use the same procedure in different ways. For example, you can call a procedure many times with different parameters to get different results.
- In Functions: Parameters not only let you put in data but also decide what the function will give back. You can think of it this way: if you have a function like this ( f(x) = y ), where ( x ) is the parameter (input) and ( y ) is the output (result).
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What Research Shows:
- Studies say that about 70% of programming students find it hard to use parameters well. This makes it tough for them to build strong functions and procedures. If they learn to manage parameters better, they can reuse their code more easily. This can improve the overall efficiency of their programs by almost 40%.