Formatting Functions

I’ve written and edited a little over two million words of computer-related material in the last 35 years. For much of that time I wrote time() to mean “the function whose name is time”. The empty parentheses aren’t part of the name: they’re there to remind readers that this is a function.

I stopped doing this about ten years ago for three reasons:

1. Someone asked me, “Then shouldn’t I write numbers[] when it’s an array or names{} when it’s a dictionary?

2. I discovered that some novice readers had trouble distinguishing between “the function called time” or “a call to time with no arguments”, since I was writing both as time().

3. I started writing more about functional programming, and even I found it confusing to figure out whether “pass a() to b()” meant “pass the function a to the function b” or “pass the result of calling a to b” or “pass the result of calling a to the result of calling b” (all of which I wanted to do in the same section of one tutorial).

I realize that the f() notation is deeply ingrained and unlikely to change, but I wonder if anyone has ever studied whether it leads to any more confusion than parenthesis-free notation. It’s the kind of thing that educators refer to as pedagogical content knowledge, and I wish we had more of it.