What are the differences between "Stored Procedures" and "Stored Functions"? So a comment from this question mentions, that there is a slight difference in "Stored Procedrues" and "Stored Funtions" in PostgreSQL.

The comment links to a wikipedia article but some of this don't seem to apply (e.g. that they can be used in a SELECT statement).

The syntax itself seem to be a little bit confusing:

CREATE FUNCTION emp_stamp() RETURNS trigger AS $emp_stamp$
    BEGIN
       [...]
    END;
$emp_stamp$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;

CREATE TRIGGER emp_stamp BEFORE INSERT OR UPDATE ON emp
    FOR EACH ROW EXECUTE PROCEDURE emp_stamp();


You create a FUNCTION but refer to it as a PROCEDURE.

So what's the difference between these two?
Officially, PostgreSQL only has "functions".  Trigger functions are sometimes referred to as "trigger procedures", but that usage has no distinct meaning.  Internally, functions are sometimes referred to as procedures, such as in the system catalog pg_proc.  That's a holdover from PostQUEL.  Any features that some people (possibly with experience in different database systems) might associate with procedures, such as their relevance to preventing SQL injections or the use of output parameters, also apply to functions as they exist in PostgreSQL.

Now, when people in the PostgreSQL community talk about "stored procedures" or "real stored procedures", however, they often mean a hypothetical feature of a function-like object that can start and stop transactions in its body, something that current functions cannot do.  The use of the term "stored procedure" in this context appears to be by analogy to other database products.  See this mailing list thread for a vague idea.

In practice, however, this distinction of function versus procedure in terms of their transaction-controlling capabilities is not universally accepted, and certainly many programmers without database bias will take a Pascal-like interpretation of a procedure as a function without return value.  (The SQL standard appears to take a middle ground, in that a procedure by default has a different transaction behavior than a function, but this can be adjusted per object.)  So in any case, and especially when looking at questions on Stack Exchange with a very mixed audience, you should avoid assuming too much and use clearer terms or define the properties that you expect.