[znkr]

> The equal sign should be reserved for comparisons, because that is what it means in mathematics.

This is touching on a pet peeve of mine: Mathematics and programming are similar in many aspects, but this is not one of them. In mathematics = is not a comparison, but a statement.

More generally, mathematics is about tautologies, that is statements that are always true. In programming, a comparison is evaluated to either true or false.

That doesn’t mean that there’s no room for conditionals in mathematics (one example is piecewise function definitions). But it’s not the same. Heck, even the definition of “function” is different between mathematics and programming.

[mastermage]

That's why procedure is so much better of a name. It's not a hill I'm willing to die on but I think it's correct.

[ffsm8]

And let's use the keyword "go-to" to run a function, back to the basics basically ಥ ‿ ಥ

[jasperry]

Seconded. Languages could even use "function" only for pure functions and "procedure" for everything else. Pascal uses "procedure" for things that don't return a value, but I think the pure vs. side effect distinction is more useful.