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Exercise

Positional arguments recap

In the Introduction to Julia course, you covered the basics of a function and how to pass arguments into a function. Before you look at more advanced functions, let's quickly recap and introduce some new terminology.

Remember that a function takes in an input and produces an output. Functions are a way to organize your code and to re-use your code effectively. The same code placed inside a function can run faster than the same code placed outside a function, so it is important to take advantage of the benefits that writing functions can offer.

When you specify the arguments of a function, you are specifying them in a set order. These are called positional arguments. Positional arguments are simply arguments that are listed in order and, when calling the function, must be passed to the function in that same order. Julia uses the position of the arguments to determine the parameter to map each input value to.

In the below example, you will write a function my_profit that takes in two positional arguments, previous_price and current_price. As these are positional arguments, it is important to get the order correct.

Instructions

100 XP
  • Define the function my_profit and return the difference between the current_price and the previous_price arguments.
  • Call my_profit using a previous_price of 100 and a current_price of 105.