Procedure in tcl: no return statement, still getting a return value?-CodePudding

I'm new to tcl, and would like to get some understanding of how return statements work in the language. Take the following code, for instance:

proc add name {
  set name [expr $name 2]
}

set y 5
puts [add $y]

I was surprised to find that this actually prints the value 7 to my terminal. I was expecting nothing to print out since I have not included a return statement in my procedure.

When I do include a return statement, it seems to override this strange default behavior:


proc add name {
  set name [expr $name 2]
  return hello
}

set y 5
puts [add $y]

The above will indeed return hello. But what does it do with the 7?

Why does the procedure still return a 7 even if I have no return statement? Why does it then override this behavior when I do provide a return statement?

CodePudding user response：

If you don't explicitly return a value, the value of the last statement executed in the proc will be returned. This is documented at https://www.tcl-lang.org/man/tcl8.6/TclCmd/proc.html at the end of the DESCRIPTION section.