Re: Multiple return values

Arthur.Chance@Smallworld.co.uk (Arthur Chance) writes:
>Most programming languages allow procedures with multiple arguments
>(in some cases allowing them to be used in curried form as well), but
>very few languages allow multiple return values, in spite of the fact
>that multiple results *are* multiple arguments when you're wearing
>CPS-tinted glasses. Why is this?


More languages require multiple return values than you may think,
since any language that permits a function to return a value of record
("struct" in C/C++) type can be considered to return multiple values
(the elements of the record). It is true that these languages often
make it clumsy to do this (the programmer has to write code to pack
and unpack the values in the record), and languages are often too
insistent on treating records as having a definite layout in memory.


Note that the C++ Standard Template Library contains the pair template
(representing a pair of objects of arbitrary type) and uses it to
implement functions that return two values.
--
-- Joe Buck http://www.synopsys.com/pubs/research/people/jbuck.html
--

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