Question

Im a but confused as to what the difference between print and return in terms of functions.

I wrote the function:

def myfun (a,b):

return a**b

myfun(5,2)

but nothing gets printed out and i dont understand because i have done this before in other functions and it works.

Answer 1

Answer:

print, as the name suggests will print the answer/output on the terminal screen or it would be used to check some values of various parameters throughout the program

whereas, return function is used to come out of a function by returning a value from where it was called.Every function will have a return value. If there is no return function then it will return none.

For e.g., in the above program,

def myfun(a,b):

     return a*b

myfun(5,2)

This program will not print anything because you are returning the result of the 2 numbers back to the called function directly,i.e., you are not storing the returned value in a variable.When returning a certain variable from a function, we need to have a place to store the returned variable.

So, you could write the third line as v=myfun(5,2).

This will store the returned value in v and then you can print v.

Otherwise you can also print value directly by calling it inside the print function like this:

print(myfun(5,2))