Invocation

The number of possibile ways to construct a subroutine (function, procedure, continuation, thread, task, process, etc.) invocation are enormous. There are dozens of known ways to express an invocation syntactically, and probably a dozen known semantics for argument passing. This brief article lists many current approaches, with examples, and offers some new styles.

Syntactic Invocation Patterns

There are dozens of ways to form an invocation, syntactically

• Prefix, parentheses required after the routine name
  
  • f(x, y, z)
    
  • f()
    
  • f(x)
    
  • f(x, g(y, z))
    
  • f(x, g(y), z)
    
  • "+"(x, y)
    
  • op+(x, y)
    
  • operator+(x, y)
    
• 
  

Semantics of Invocation

Semantics of Argument Passing