VPython Functions

Written by Kevin Randrup

Introduction to functions in Python and applying them to write shorter and more understandable code. Assumes that VPython is installed and you understand the basics of programming in Python.

Summary

Functions at a high level are used to perform a certain task. Functions can accept a number of inputs (also "arguments" or "parameters") and can give back 0 or 1 output values. Furthermore, they make code much easier to understand by encapsulating a task in a single line of code instead of being repeated over and over again.

Whenever you type print(5), you are calling a function called print with an argument of 5. This page will describe the basics of functions and how to

Basic of Functions

Basic Python function syntax

Functions can be defined with the def keyword followed by the function name and a colon. The return keyword can be used for a function to "give back" a result.

def functionName(argumentOne, argumentTwo):
    functionReturnValue = argumentOne + argumentTwo
    return functionReturnValue

Example function

# This function adds three numbers together and gives back the result using the return keyword
def addNumbers(a, b, c):
    return a + b + c

Example use of a function

# Calls the function addNumbers with the arguments 1, 2 and 4
result = addNumbers(1, 2, 4)

Writing your own Functions

Writing a function for a task instead of copy and pasting code makes your program much easier to understand and debug. The best way to illustrate this is with an example.

For this example, we will create a function to calculate the electric field created by a point charge.

As a reminder, this is the formula we are modeling:

[math]\displaystyle{ \overrightarrow{E}=\frac{1}{4πε_0} \frac{q}{|\overrightarrow{r}|^2} \hat r }[/math]

First, we ask what do we need to calculate the electric field?

• [math]\displaystyle{ q }[/math] - the charge of the source
• [math]\displaystyle{ \overrightarrow{r} }[/math] - the distance from the source to the electric field

[math]\displaystyle{ q }[/math] and [math]\displaystyle{ \overrightarrow{r} }[/math] will be the two arguments to our function which will look like this:

# Calculates the electric field at a given vector away from the charge
def electricField(q, r):
    electricConstant = 9e9 # 1/(4 * π * e0)
    return electricConstant * q * r.norm() / r.mag2

Using the function

We can apply functions to make our code shorter and easier to understand. Here is some example code that we will shorten with functions.

# Calculate the eletric field in two different places
charge = 1.6e-19
origin = vector(0,0,0)

point1 = vector(-10, 5, 15)
point2 = vector(20, -5, 12)

field1 = 9e9 * charge * point1.norm() / point1.mag2
field2 = 9e9 * charge * point2.norm() / point2.mag2

We can use a function in the last 2 lines to reduce the duplicated code to the following

field1 = electricField(charge, point1)
field2 = electricField(charge, point2)

See also

Are there related topics or categories in this wiki resource for the curious reader to explore? How does this topic fit into that context?

Further reading

Python standard library of functions: https://docs.python.org/2/library/functions.html