3.12 Void and Undefined

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1 | Welcome to Racket
2 | Racket Essentials
3 | Built-In Datatypes
4 | Expressions and Definitions
5 | Programmer-Defined Datatypes
6 | Modules
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21 | More Libraries
22 | Dialects of Racket and Scheme
| Bibliography
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▼ | 3 | Built-In Datatypes

3.1 | Booleans
3.2 | Numbers
3.3 | Characters
3.4 | Strings (Unicode)
3.5 | Bytes and Byte Strings
3.6 | Symbols
3.7 | Keywords
3.8 | Pairs and Lists
3.9 | Vectors
3.10 | Hash Tables
3.11 | Boxes
3.12 | Void and Undefined

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#### 3.12`` Void and Undefined

Some procedures or expression forms have no need for a result value. For example, the display procedure is called only for the side-effect of writing output. In such cases the result value is normally a special constant that prints as #<void>. When the result of an expression is simply #<void>, the REPL does not print anything.

The void procedure takes any number of arguments and returns #<void>. (That is, the identifier void is bound to a procedure that returns #<void>, instead of being bound directly to #<void>.)

Examples:
> ( void)
> ( void 1 2 3)
> ( list ( void))
'(#<void>)

A constant that prints as #<undefined> is used as the result of a reference to a local binding when the binding is not yet initialized. Such early references are not possible for bindings that correspond to procedure arguments, let bindings, or let* bindings; early reference requires a recursive binding context, such as letrec or local defines in a procedure body. Also, early references to top-level and module-level bindings raise an exception, instead of producing #<undefined>. For these reasons, #<undefined> rarely appears.

( define (strange)
( define x x)
x)

> (strange)
#<undefined>

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