Procedural and Functional Abstraction

One of the distinguishing principles of computer science is its use of various kinds of abstraction. Abstraction is the ability to filter out information that is not necessary to a problem and to generalize those details that are significant. For example, if you are designing a kitchen, then a floor plan would be a useful abstraction. It would focus on the dimensions of the appliances (essential information) while filtering out their make and model.

One important form of abstraction is procedural abstraction. We've already used procedures in App Inventor to break a problem into parts and to encapsulate certain tasks that need to be repeated. We will want to make more use of procedures now that our apps are getting more complicated.

We have already used the following block to define procedures that perform a sequence of actions but do not return a result:

We now want to learn to define and use procedures that do return results. These are typically called functions. A function is procedure that takes 0 or more arguments and returns a value.

Built-in Functions

The sqrt function takes one argument (here 100) and returns the square root of its argument. In this example, we are calling the sqrt function and passing it the value 100. It will return the value 10, which we can then plug in to any slot that takes a value -- e.g., into a text box or into a math expression.

A Really Simple Example

App Inventor gives us the ability to write our own functions using the procedureWithResult block. Note that it has an open slot for an argument and an open slot for a result and a body where we can do a sequence of operations:

Here's an example in which we define a function that calculates the square of any number and then we call the function and pass it the argument 10.

Note that calling our square function looks just the same (except for the colors) as calling the sqrt function.

In this case the function is so simple that there is nothing to "do" other than perform the calculation and return the result. So we can just put our calculation in the return slot.

Of course, we wouldn't typically define a procedure for such a simple calculation. So let's look at a more likely example.

Pythagorean Theorm Example

Suppose your app needs to caluculate the hypotenuse of a right triangle. You probably remember the Pythagorean Theorem from high school geometry -- i.e., the formula for calculating the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle based on the lengths of its other two sides. The length of the hypotenuse is equal to the square root of the sum of the squares of the other two sides:

c = √ a2+ b2 

Here's a function that will perform this calculation in App Inventor.

Here again, there is nothing to "do" besides perform the calculation so we just return the result of calculating √ a2+ b2 .

Testing Our Function with "Do-It"

Before you use your function in your app, you should test if. If you right-click on a call to the function, you can test it using App Inventor's Do-it option, as shown here:

Using the Function in an App

When the CalculateHypotenuse button is clicked, the values in the aInput and bInput text boxes are passed to our hypotenuse function and its result is put in the Result text box.

Exercises

Then create a page on your portfolio, with commentary, to show your work.

1. Calculate the conversion from temperature in fahrenheit to temperature in celsius using the formula: C = 5⁄9(F-32).

2. Calculate the conversion from kilometers to miles using the formula: M = K × 0.62.

3. (Challenging) Write a function named isOdd that will return true if its argument is odd and false if it is even. HINT: A number is odd if it leaves a remainder of 1 after you divide it by 2. Even though it is not absolutely necessary to do so, you might want to use the body on this function to "do" an if-else. In that case you will need a global variable to temporarily store result that you want to return.

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