Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Variadic function
Summary
In mathematics and in computer programming, a variadic function is a function of indefinite arity, i.e., one which accepts a variable number of arguments. Support for variadic functions differs widely among programming languages.
The term variadic is a neologism, dating back to 1936–1937. The term was not widely used until the 1970s.
There are many mathematical and logical operations that come across naturally as variadic functions. For instance, the summing of numbers or the concatenation of strings or other sequences are operations that can be thought of as applicable to any number of operands (even though formally in these cases the associative property is applied).
Another operation that has been implemented as a variadic function in many languages is output formatting. The C function and the Common Lisp function are two such examples. Both take one argument that specifies the formatting of the output, and any number of arguments that provide the values to be formatted.
Variadic functions can expose type-safety problems in some languages. For instance, C's , if used incautiously, can give rise to a class of security holes known as format string attacks. The attack is possible because the language support for variadic functions is not type-safe: it permits the function to attempt to pop more arguments off the stack than were placed there, corrupting the stack and leading to unexpected behavior. As a consequence of this, the CERT Coordination Center considers variadic functions in C to be a high-severity security risk.
In functional languages variadics can be considered complementary to the apply function, which takes a function and a list/sequence/array as arguments, and calls the function with the arguments supplied in that list, thus passing a variable number of arguments to the function. In the functional language Haskell, variadic functions can be implemented by returning a value of a type class ; if instances of are a final return value and a function , this allows for any number of additional arguments .
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.