A routine is formed by the repetition of activities or actions over time.
From the French routine , a routine is a custom or habit that is acquired by repeating the same task or activity many times. Routine implies a practice that, over time, develops almost automatically, without the need to involve reasoning.
For example: "I don't want to work in an office : I hate routine," "For my mother, routine gives her security and peace of mind," "The truth is that routine bores me," "We're going to spend the weekend at the beach to break the routine and recover the passion .
The daily routine
Daily life is usually made up of routines, especially in relation to the workplace; Getting up at 7 in the morning, having a cup of coffee for breakfast, traveling by train and having another coffee in the office is a routine shared by millions of people.
Routine is usually associated with tedious or boring , which is why vacations appear as the time chosen to leave routine aside and embark on activities that, due to work or academic obligations for the rest of the year, cannot be carried out.
Advantages and disadvantages
On the other hand, it should be noted that routine is a mechanism that provides security (minimizes unforeseen events) and saves time (by avoiding infrequent tasks). Of course, if taken to the extreme, this has a price; It is no coincidence that the highest rate of depression, stress and suicide occurs in cities, the undisputed focus of the unfortunate rat race .
Although it is a name that denotes a certain contempt for an animal species (as is customary for human beings), the expression rat race alludes to an unbridled activity that does not have a clear objective, to that constant movement of life in large cities, which keeps inhabitants always busy and anxious because they believe that they will not be able to fulfill all their obligations, and without enough free time to stop and reflect on their lives and their goals.
In programming, a routine is a sequence of instructions that does not vary.
Routine in computing
A routine (also known as a function or subroutine , among other names) is an invariable sequence of instructions that is part of a program and that can be used over and over again. In this sense, the routine is presented as a subalgorithm within the main algorithm (the program), which allows the resolution of a specific task.
Depending on the type of language, routines offer a variable number of possibilities, which inevitably affect the logic used by developers when creating them. Two common examples of features that are not available in all cases are the inline type and references as parameters .
The first refers to a type of function that orders the compiler to insert its code in all the places from which it is called, thus expanding the length of said sections at run time, but granting, in turn, a greater convenience during the programming process. It is important to note that an inline function is different from a macro, both in age and features , with the former being more modern and flexible than the latter.
Functions may or may not accept parameters, that is, values on which to work; These are not usually random, but rather correspond to data from the program itself, such as the position of some object or a state to which you want to go. This information, however, is only a copy of the original, used simply as a guide; Languages that accept the use of references as parameters, on the other hand, give the possibility of affecting external variables, which is very useful, as long as they are not very heavy objects.