Side effect (computer science)

In computer science, an operation or expression is said to have a side effect if it has any observable effect other than its primary effect of reading the value of its arguments and returning a value to the invoker of the operation. Example side effects include modifying a non-local variable, a static local variable or a mutable argument passed by reference; performing I/O; or calling other functions with side-effects. In the presence of side effects, a program's behaviour may depend on history; that is, the order of evaluation matters. Understanding and debugging a function with side effects requires knowledge about the context and its possible histories. Side effects play an important role in the design and analysis of programming languages. The degree to which side effects are used depends on the programming paradigm. For example, imperative programming is commonly used to produce side effects, to update a system's state. By contrast, declarative programming is commonly used to report on the state of system, without side effects. Functional programming aims to minimize or eliminate side effects. The lack of side effects makes it easier to do formal verification of a program. The functional language Haskell eliminates side effects such as I/O and other stateful computations by replacing them with monadic actions. Functional languages such as Standard ML, Scheme and Scala do not restrict side effects, but it is customary for programmers to avoid them. Effect systems extend types to keep track of effects, permitting concise notation for functions with effects, while maintaining information about the extent and nature of side effects. In particular, functions without effects correspond to pure functions. Assembly language programmers must be aware of hidden side effects—instructions that modify parts of the processor state which are not mentioned in the instruction's mnemonic. A classic example of a hidden...