How to call a procedure inside of another procedure

Question

I'm working on creating a large .py file that can be imported and used to solve mathematical formulas. I'd like to store the formulas in a procedure that is called input1_input2_input3(): for example the formual distance=speed*time is called dis_spe_tim().

The code so far is:

def dis_spe_tim():
    def distance(speed, time):
        result = speed*time
        unit = input("What unit are you measuring the distance in?")
        print(resule,unit)

    def speed():
        print("speed")

and I would ideally like the user to use this like so:

import equations #name of the .py file
from equations import *
dis_spe_tim.distance(1,2)

Unfortunately, this is my first time ever doing something like this so I have absolutely no idea how to go about calling the procedure inside of the procedure and providing its arguments.

Answer 1

Short answer: you can't. Nested functions are local to the function they're defined in and only exists during the outer function's execution ( def is an executable statement that, at runtime, creates a function object and bind it to it's name in the enclosing namespace).

The canonical python solution is to use modules as namespaces (well, Python modules ARE, mainly, namespaces), ie have a distinct module for each "formula", and define the functions at the module's top-level:

# dis_spe_tim.py
def distance(speed, time):
   # code here

def speed():
   # code here

Then put all those modules in an equations package (mostly: a folder containing modules and an __init__.py file). Then you can do:

from equations import dis_spe_tim
dis_spe_tim.distance(1,2)

You can check the doc for more on modules and packages here: https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/modules.html#packages

Also note that

1/ "star imports" (also named "wildcard imports"), ie from somemodule import * , are highly discouraged as they tend to make the code harder to read and maintain and can cause unexpected (and sometimes subtles enough to be hard to spot) breakages.

2/ you shouldn't mix "domain" code (code that do effective computations) with UI code (code that communicates with the user), so any call to input() , print() etc should be outside the "domain" code. This is key to make your domain code usable with different UIs (command-line, text-based (curse etc), GUI, web, whatever), but also, quite simply, to make sure your domain code is easily testable in isolation (unit testing...).