Bay 12 Games Forum

During her voyage to New Atlantis, Ann spent a good deal of time watching the ship's crew work. After her experience observing the ships' pointers coordinate the insertion of new ships into their convoy, her interest in the ships' operations increased significantly. She was fascinated by the range of different tasks that she observed aboard the ship. Ann spent hours watching as the sailors hoisted sails, tied off ropes, cleaned the decks, recorded headings, and checked the ocean depths. Ann tried to learn as much as she could about how each of these jobs was done. Although it was highly unlikely that she would ever work on a ship herself, she still found it all incredibly interesting.

One morning Ann asked the captain where she could learn more. Always eager to help, the captain disappeared into the ship's command cabin and returned with a 4,096 page Sailor's Manual (3rd edition). Ann was shocked.

"Why is it so large?" she asked.

"There is a lot to know." responded the captain with pride. "It takes the average sailor 5 years to learn the very basics and another 35 to learn the rest of the manual."

"I see" Ann replied. That seemed like a rather large cost to learn sailing. Ann was convinced that it probably took years to simply read through the manual itself. From her experience, operational manuals were rarely quick reads.

That night, Ann took the sailing manual out onto the deck. Although she knew that reading would certainly not help her seasickness, she was intensely curious to learn more. She opened up to a random page and started reading. It was a section on how to tie the ship to the dock. The instructions occupied 3 full pages of tiny print. The level of detail was amazing. Each instruction spelled out every last aspect of the task. Ann read each line, trying to absorb the information. She even practiced the instructions for tying the ropes into knots (25 lines long) on her own shoe laces. After about half an hour, she felt that she actually had a pretty good understanding of the procedure.

The next section that she found was about how to tie a dingy to the side of the boat. Again, the section occupied 3 pages of tiny print. As Ann scanned the instructions, something jumped out at her: large chunks of the instructions were the same as she had seen previously. In fact, the 25 lines about tying the rope were absolutely identical. She flipped back and forth rapidly between the two sections to confirm.

The next day she approached the captain about this discovery.

"How observant!" he congratulated her. "Many of the concepts are very similar. For example, take ropes. There are only a few really good ways to tie knots."

"But, why repeat the instructions line for line?" asked Ann.

"Because you need to do them each time. It would be horrible to skip the part about actually tying the knot. The dingy would simply drift off."

"Yes. I understand that. But why not just say something like: 'Tie the rope with a granny knot'. I bet that it would save you a lot of space. 24 lines in this section alone." suggested Ann.

"But," objected the captain. "Wouldn't that make it much harder to understand the instructions. Right now, every step is laid out perfectly. I can hand any sailor the 35 pages about trimming the main sail without having to assume any prior knowledge."

"No." argued Ann. "It would make it easier. Once a sailor learns how to tie a specific knot, he or she could do it in any context. It would become a fundamental step itself… like a computer function."

"I guess it would make things shorter." agreed the captain. "But really, the length of the book is not a big problem. We also use the books for ballast, so having heavy books can be useful."

"It is better than that," argued Ann, ignoring the comment about ballast. "What if you find a better knot? Right now you have to change every single instruction that uses the current knot. I bet it is a long and error prone process. If you are writing the same thing a hundred times, then I bet that you will make a mistake one of those times. In fact, I bet you already have dozens of mistakes in the different copies of those instructions. And what if you want to instruct a sailor to do something new, like… tie down a hot air ballon? Do you have instructions for that?"

"Well… no." admitted the captain.

"Then wouldn't it be easier to say: 1) Grab the rope, and 2) Tie it to the port railing with a granny knot. Those are instructions you can even give verbally."

The captain fell silent and stared out into the sea. After a moment he nodded slowly.

"I think you are correct!" he declared loudly. After three days at sea with him, Ann had realized that the captain was a big fan of declaring things loudly.

Ann smiled.

"And I bet it goes beyond simply tying ropes. The signals that we use to communicate can be broken off into functions too. Will you help me rewrite the book? We could break things up into these standalone units that you describe. It would revolutionize the entire sailing industry!" the captain asked.

Ann's smile faltered. While she could not resist an opportunity to improve the performance of the entire royal navy, she was still on her quest to save the kingdom. Silently, she weighed the options in her mind. Finally, with much regret, she declined the offer. But since she believed deeply in the value of the effort, she wrote a request to her father to send six of the kingdom's top computational thinkers to aid the effort. Satisfied that they would be as helpful as she could be, Ann let her mind wander onto other questions.

int larger(int first, int second)
{if (first>second)
return first;
else
return second;}

so now in main, if ever you want to find out which of 2 numbers is larger, you just use the new user defined function larger,
larger(5,7); would return 7,
int x=5, y=8;
larger(y,x); would return 8, etc.

a void function returns the contents of the function on function call instead of a value

void Rules();
{std::cout << "These are the rules";}

now in int, whenever you use the function Rules, it will output the phrase "These are the rules".